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Larrabee ISA Revealed
David Greene writes "Intel has released information on Larrabee's ISA. Far more than an instruction set for graphics, Larrabee's ISA provides x86 users with a vector architecture reminiscent of the top supercomputers of the late 1990s and early 2000s. '... Intel has also been applying additional transistors in a different way — by adding more cores. This approach has the great advantage that, given software that can parallelize across many such cores, performance can scale nearly linearly as more and more cores get packed onto chips in the future. Larrabee takes this approach to its logical conclusion, with lots of power-efficient in-order cores clocked at the power/performance sweet spot. Furthermore, these cores are optimized for running not single-threaded scalar code, but rather multiple threads of streaming vector code, with both the threads and the vector units further extending the benefits of parallelization.' Things are going to get interesting."
IA64 was rejected because it was too lean. It's actually a horrendously complicated ISA which requires the compiler to do a lot of the work for it, but it turns out that compilers aren't very good at the sort of stuff the ISA requires (instruction reordering, branch prediction etc.) It also turned out that EPIC CPUs are very complex and power-hunger things, and IA32/x86-64 had easily caught up with and surpassed many of the so-called advantages that Intel had touted for IA64.
The only reason Itanium is still hanging around like a bad smell is because companies like HP were dumb enough to dump their own perfectly good RISC CPUs on a flimsy promise from Intel, and now they have no choice.
I'm gonna go ahead and agree with management that maintainability is more important than any other factor. Having had to maintain a few ancient codebases is my day, I've seen way too many "clever" coders that do ridiculous tricks to save time or space. Well designed (read: maintainable) code does not imply any significant performance hit.
If you watch large teams of programmers, the managment actually force the developers to write slow code, claiming that maintainability is more important than any other factor!
I don't see why it should be one or the other - maintainability is important, as is using optimal algorithms. Fast algorithms can still be written in a clear and understandable manner.