3 ms·
> Arguably Itanium's failure was due to exceeding the weirdness budget with VLIW nonsense Being VLIW was probably the least weird part of Itanium. The NaT ("no
by cesarb 5y ago
> Arguably Itanium's failure was due to exceeding the weirdness budget with VLIW nonsense
Being VLIW was probably the least weird part of Itanium. The NaT ("not a thing") bit on every register was the weirdest part and probably the one which tripped people the most. And like SPARC, it had register windows. It also had a pair of stacks instead of a single one, a set of predicate registers (which also had their own register windows), and plenty of other assorted weirdness.
- monocasa 5y agoThe advanced loads (sort of software controlled speculative loads) were real goofy too (but neat!)
- bpye 5y agox86 sort of has two stacks today as a security mitigation https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-kernel-internals-blog/understanding-hardware-enforced-stack-protection/ba-p/1247815 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-kernel-intern...