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I think Itanium mattered. Its EPIC instruction set tried to push the scheduling complexity from hardware into the compiler, which proved too difficult. That's p

I think Itanium mattered. Its EPIC instruction set tried to push the scheduling complexity from hardware into the compiler, which proved too difficult. That's part of why it failed.

FullyFunctional 6y ago
Great example. Seeing as I'm working on my Merced box I felt like commenting on this. Intel/HP did many things wrong when they designed EPIC. The absence of dynamic scheduling was supposed to have made it simpler and thus have a faster cycle time. Alas it was so bloated when it finally arrived and horrendously complicated that it clock very slowly (mine @ 733 MHz while contemporaries ran at 1+ GHz). The EPIC designers probably also didn't anticipate the advances in OoO machines that got really good. Trying to statically schedule for unknown load-misses isn't just difficult, it's impossible without code explosion. EPIC got some things right, but design by committee and betting again dynamic scheduling doomed it.