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> The Itanium was a real superstar for floating point performance. No. Itanium was never a superstar - it was merely competitive when it was at best, and even

> The Itanium was a real superstar for floating point performance. No. Itanium was never a superstar - it was merely competitive when it was at best, and even that was only if you ignored the price/performance, and some of its versions were pretty bad in absolute performance and nowhere near competitive, and it was plain abysmal if you consider price/performance. Also, majority of practical, important numerical computations were memory bandwidth bound, and thus it didn't matter as much whether you can pack the loop perfectly. And Itanium was almost never the highest memory bandwidth machine during its lifetime, partially due to many of its delays. Itanium would be my choice for the worst architecture, as it successfully killed other cpus, and produced a lot of not very useful research. MIPS (and Hennessy and Patterson) would be my first choice, for upending the architecture design. Honorable mentions from me would be IBM 801 (lead to many research), Intel iAXP 432 (for capability architecture, which I think will come back at some point), z80 and 8501 for ushering the computing power everywhere, x86-64 for "the best enduring hack". Anyway, the article itself is great, and I wish I had asked the same question to some of those folks mentioned in the article, and many other architects and researchers when I met them...

rjsw 7y ago
David Patterson didn't work on MIPS.
microtherion 7y ago
> MIPS (and Hennessy and Patterson) would be my first choice, for upending the architecture design. I agree that it was a revolutionary design for the time. From today's perspective, some of the choices made did not age all that well (in particular branch and load delay slots). For assembly level programming/debugging, my favorite architecture by far was POWER/PowerPC. Looking at x86 code vs PowerPC after Apple's switch made me almost cry, although the performance benefits were undeniable.

rjsw 7y ago

David Patterson didn't work on MIPS.

microtherion 7y ago

> MIPS (and Hennessy and Patterson) would be my first choice, for upending the architecture design. I agree that it was a revolutionary design for the time. From today's perspective, some of the choices made did not age all that well (in particular branch and load delay slots). For assembly level programming/debugging, my favorite architecture by far was POWER/PowerPC. Looking at x86 code vs PowerPC after Apple's switch made me almost cry, although the performance benefits were undeniable.