3 ms·
It is great to see a new cpu architecture to come to market. It is very interesting to see, that they pick up the VLIW architecture again. For true progress, we
by _ph_ 7y ago
It is great to see a new cpu architecture to come to market. It is very interesting to see, that they pick up the VLIW architecture again. For true progress, we need very different aproaches to compete. As they are using the TSMC 7nm process, the processor will be produced on a cutting edge process. So it won't be hold back by running on an inferior process. Many good design have been killed in the past, because they were produced on a process that couldn't compete with the market leaders. I wondern, how ell the Ithanium could perform, if it were ported to 7nm. Many designs, which didn't work 10 to 20 years ago, could perform vastly better on a current process.
- cwzwarich 7y agoWhy would you think that VLIW microarchitectures would benefit from newer process nodes more than other microarchitectures?
- _ph_ 7y agoDifferent architectures scale differently with the transistor count. Clock speed for traditional desktop/server chips hasn't increased a lot over the last decade. A lot of transistors have been thrown at speculative execution to increase the effective speed by implicitly creating parallelism. Besides the security problems associated with speculative execution, this is an uphill battle. Explicit parallelism is an interesting alternative. One reason, that the Itanium failed, was that it was considered huge and power-hungry. And indeed its transistor count was high compared to the x86 chips of the time. But times have changed. The 3 billion transistors of the last-gen Itanium look almost tiny compared to the over 8 billion transistors in Apples A13.