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Intel Dumps Iitanium's x86 Hardware Compatibility
Spinlock_1977 writes "C|Net is running a story that Intel is going back to software x86 emulation on Itanium in order to reclaim chip real estate. (room for another 9MB of cache?)
One notable quote about x86 emulation: 'Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else,' said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. 'Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate.'"
if they are going to dump x86 compatibility, why not dump Itanium compatibility and just go back to Alpha?
Politics. Yes, Alpha is a much superior platform, technically speaking, than pretty much anything else out there today. But for Intel to turn their back on Itanic (thank you, Register, for consistently misnaming the Itanium in such an apt way) would mean admitting that the billions of R&D they spent on it was a waste. HP also has political reasons to not resurrect Alpha.
Damn shame, that. If they'd poured as much money into Alpha as they did into Itanic, they'd have a platform that would whomp all over everything currently in the marketplace.
If you have the time to hand-optimize your code, it blows anything out of the water. This means it's useful for simple number crunching, but not much else - more processors are generally cheaper than more coders. It was expected that compilers would improve by the time Itanium was adopted, but that hasn't really happened. (I read here that the hurd coders were able to make their Itanium message-passing routine TEN TIMES faster by doing it in hand-coded assembly compared to what a compiler churned out)
I am trolling
Yes it is, because MB means 1000 Kilobytes, and MiB means 1024 Kibibytes. Usually you're off by a factor of about 0.91 or 1.1, which can mean a lot. Please don't insult the functionality of accuracy. :D
What day is it? Could you please tell me?