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It paid off just fine except in a monetary sense. They got to market with a low power fast x86 clone, arguably creating that low power market. However, for tha
by CalChris 6y ago
It paid off just fine except in a monetary sense. They got to market with a low power fast x86 clone, arguably creating that low power market.
However, for that thankless and difficult task of creating an X86 clone (x87 was a nightmare) they received the great prize of competing against Intel in both manufacturing and marketing.
Moreover, they were a 32b machine in 2000 and 64b was right around the corner. Indeed when AMD64 came along, announced in 2000, it was simpler and forced Intel+HP to give up on Itanium. (Yes, Itanium had other problems but engineering problems can, to a degree, be surmounted. Market problems are harder.)
- fulafel 6y agoIt's always possible that they had just bad luck / timing, but why didn't anyone try/succeed with it since?
- CalChris 6y agoWell a bunch of the Crusoe people did. They eventually got acquired by Nvidia and that’s what Denver is. Not VLIW though.
- monocasa 6y agoI was pretty sure that both the Transmeta cores, as well as the Denver cores were VLIW internally.
- fulafel 6y agoYep, The OOO nature of the cpu might make the static scheduling less attractive for Denver. But I think the public info doesn't say either way vliw or not. Also it's now mainstream (Intel does it) to have an intermediate code storage format with the introduction of trace caches. I wonder what the usual format of those is.