Troubles with Merced

Brandon Bell writes "Everyone has their theory on why Intel's Merced is in trouble. Kraemer just wrote an opinion piece that discusses two problems he thinks its facing: the compiler and the sales model."

Comments

Buzzwords make it easy to spot the idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy clearly doesn't know anything more about what EPIC is other than what the acronym expands too.

Even from the small amount of information published about IA64, it is clear that there is absolutely no support for automatic scaling simply by adding cpus. EPIC refers to the way each individual cpu decodes the instruction stream. EPIC is no more inherently multi-processor than the current IA32 instruction set.

To get automatic scaling, you need something like Tera's Multi-Threaded Architecture. Too bad they can't seem to ship the damn thing, and that it costs a couple of million.

See: http://www.tera.com/ for more info.

Only half right

[Doug Merritt]

Certainly the compiler is known to be a difficult important issue with Merced, so that part is sort of right -- although I don't see that as a reason for them to slip ship dates.

But I don't know where he got this idea that Merced automatically makes all applications multi-processor ready; that's just plain wrong. High end processors have had multiple execution units for many years, which allows them a small amount of very fine grain parallelism: on average perhaps two instructions can be executed at once. Sometimes when you're lucky it can be more than two for a short burst. Merced will *not* be able to keep all 7 of their execution units busy 100% of the time, but they may get lucky and do so for an instant every once in a while, if their compilers are really good.

None of that has anything whatsoever to do with multiple cpu's. The situation with those will be unchanged from the situation today with multiple e.g. Pentiums: applications won't take advantage of more than one cpu unless they are explicitly coded to do so.

Therefore the conclusion of the article is dead wrong: the business model won't change, because he just misunderstood the issue with parallelism.