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

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.