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My understanding of this product is that it is a revisiting of Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) as seen in Itanium 20 years ago. I think that the idea of VLIW

by en4bz 7y ago

My understanding of this product is that it is a revisiting of Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) as seen in Itanium 20 years ago. I think that the idea of VLIW was a good idea that failed at the time due to the pure momentum of x86 and Moore's law. Now the Moore's is basically at its end and x86 is partially stagnating, at least from Intel, other platforms like ARM are gaining traction and it seems like a good time to revisit VLIW. I think another key factor is that most applications now run on top of platforms/frameworks rather than at the native level. This means you only need to port Linux, the JVM, node, python, and a few others and you captured a pretty large potential audience. Compare this to the mid 00's when moving to Itanium meant porting all you native apps.

ur-whale 7y ago
> VLIW was a good idea that failed at the time due to the pure momentum of x86 and Moore's law. It also failed because of Intel's very poor handling of the developers who wanted to switch to the Itanium architecture and eventually gave up because there was only support for big shops.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Looking at so many architectures that failed over time, I do think this strongly correlates with not having a critical mass of users/developers. Sparc, PowerPC could have had a much better and longer life, if there had been affordable motherboards in a common form factor available for enthusiasts. That is especially important, if your CPU architecture is vastly different from the mainstream. So if Intel had made reasonably priced Itaniums available for the Linux crowd, software support could have increased considerably. I think a lot of scientists would have loved Itanium systems for their great float pointing performance. But the times, where scientists get equipped with expensive work stations, ended somwhere in the mid-90ies. Likewise, I hope that this new CPU becomes easily available to enthusiasts and think that its viability even would depend on it.

by en4bz 7y ago

ur-whale 7y ago

> VLIW was a good idea that failed at the time due to the pure momentum of x86 and Moore's law. It also failed because of Intel's very poor handling of the developers who wanted to switch to the Itanium architecture and eventually gave up because there was only support for big shops.

_ph_ 7y ago
Looking at so many architectures that failed over time, I do think this strongly correlates with not having a critical mass of users/developers. Sparc, PowerPC could have had a much better and longer life, if there had been affordable motherboards in a common form factor available for enthusiasts. That is especially important, if your CPU architecture is vastly different from the mainstream. So if Intel had made reasonably priced Itaniums available for the Linux crowd, software support could have increased considerably. I think a lot of scientists would have loved Itanium systems for their great float pointing performance. But the times, where scientists get equipped with expensive work stations, ended somwhere in the mid-90ies. Likewise, I hope that this new CPU becomes easily available to enthusiasts and think that its viability even would depend on it.