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> In 1994, Intel and HP looked around and saw a wide variety of successful server CPU architectures like Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, and POWER. This annoyed them and th
by DrBazza 5y ago
> In 1994, Intel and HP looked around and saw a wide variety of successful server CPU architectures like Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, and POWER. This annoyed them and they decided to make a new CPU that no one would want to use.
I spent some time "optimizing" code to run on Itanium for "MegaBank". Who then dumped it. Then we swapped to AMD Opteron for while before Intel caught back up.
I suppose it was successful in that it created work.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoI'm pretty surprised to hear "MegaBank" ran AMD. Not that Opteron wasn't awesome and better than what Intel had at most things, at least until Woodcrest if not Nehalem. But because MegaBanks are usually pretty conservative. More than a few still run mainframes and proprietary unixes. Unless you worked in their HFT group, that is.
- DrBazza 5y agoWe wrote quant code that had to run on all architectures... for the HFT team [1], unfortunately, including a long drawn out debacle supporting Solaris 5.7 for an absurdly long time. Other members of my team were looking at IBM architectures as well, mostly because IBM were throwing money at us to use their kit. [1] high frequency, not necessarily low latency, for some defintion of the word 'high'.