It's great to see these technologies applied to an important hard problem (herding flocks away from flight paths near airports).
Speaking of flocking bird behavior, on a lighter note, consider the complexities of migrating geese:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...
Yes, incompatibility was an insurmountable problem for IA-64, and x86-64 was what the market needed and wanted. That said, VLIW had other issues of its own that limited its success.
VLIW emerged in the mid 90's as a potential successor to RISC aimed at improving performance per chip. It had many innovative aspects and more fully leveraged advanced compiler capabilities. Unfortunately, VLIW improved only the "infinite cache" component of uniprocessor performance, and put greater load (per useful instruction executed) upon the cache/memory hierarchy. For most workloads VLIW was focused on solving the wrong problem. It was well suited though for some technical applications.
HP and Intel embraced VLIW around 1995. It looked promising at the time. It had its technology evangelists and marketing sizzle. Then multi-core chips happened (POWER4 shipped in 2001). Multi-core has proven to be the superior path forward for increasing performance per chip. Today many cores per chip is commonplace in the x86 marketplace. It's proven to be a much more effective way of using the available circuits (and power) per chip.
Perhaps VLIW plays a valuable role somewhere today but not in the commercial server or PC space.
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It's great to see these technologies applied to an important hard problem (herding flocks away from flight paths near airports). Speaking of flocking bird behavior, on a lighter note, consider the complexities of migrating geese: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...
Yes, incompatibility was an insurmountable problem for IA-64, and x86-64 was what the market needed and wanted. That said, VLIW had other issues of its own that limited its success.
VLIW emerged in the mid 90's as a potential successor to RISC aimed at improving performance per chip. It had many innovative aspects and more fully leveraged advanced compiler capabilities. Unfortunately, VLIW improved only the "infinite cache" component of uniprocessor performance, and put greater load (per useful instruction executed) upon the cache/memory hierarchy. For most workloads VLIW was focused on solving the wrong problem. It was well suited though for some technical applications.
HP and Intel embraced VLIW around 1995. It looked promising at the time. It had its technology evangelists and marketing sizzle. Then multi-core chips happened (POWER4 shipped in 2001). Multi-core has proven to be the superior path forward for increasing performance per chip. Today many cores per chip is commonplace in the x86 marketplace. It's proven to be a much more effective way of using the available circuits (and power) per chip.
Perhaps VLIW plays a valuable role somewhere today but not in the commercial server or PC space.