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This doesn't seem to be the best-researched article out there. If they thought Itanium was bad, they should have looked into the i860. Itanium was an attempt t

• causality0 4y ago
  Yes, and no mention of the Transmeta Crusoe either.
• the_only_law 4y ago
  > The i960 was take 2 and their joint venture called BiiN also shuttered. I have an old X-11 terminal I believe has a i960 in it. I’m shocked that thing was capable of running CDE desktops when it stutters on FVWM over a network much faster than it ever was intended to see.
• notacoward 4y ago
  At least the 960 was somewhat usable. Many variants were created, and several were widely used in embedded products for quite a few years. The 860, however, was Just Crap. Full stop. End of story. IIRC it had weird double-instruction modes that compilers just couldn't handle, and if you used them anyway (for very necessary performance) then handling exceptions properly was all but impossible. Definitely gets my vote for worst ever.
  • kps 4y ago
    I worked on an unreleased third-party C compiler for the i860. It wasn't that compilers couldn't handle the double-issue float mode, it was more that it was worthless in real-world code due to the entry/exit latency. It had high performance on paper but not in reality, which was exactly the lesson that Intel did not learn for the Itanium.
  • LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    I remember articles from Byte hyping it(the 860), also adverts for accelerator cards. It runs rings around workstations!
  • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Interesting that Intel has such an impressive record of failed designs. Itanium, 860, and iAPX 432 - all anti-classics of their time.
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• pinewurst 4y ago
  I remember evaluating the 960 for an embedded router project and it was quite a nice ISA. Plus the 66 Mhz CA part was fast for the price at the time.
  • kps 4y ago
    The i960CA was the one of the first superscalar microprocessors. (I wrote a third-party commercial instruction scheduler for it, that operated on assembly code.) It was pretty nice, certainly in line with the other 32-bit RISCy ISAs of the time. My impression is that its relative lack of success was due to Intel internal politics.
    • rondrabkin 4y ago
      Yes within Intel it was thought that management would not push the 960 since if did so it would be picked up by the press as validated RISC is better. But for embedded applications it was very successful, I was shipping hundreds of thousands of them per month at one point
• tsss 4y ago
  Bulldozer gets too much hate IMO. Okay, the instructions per clock cycle were bad and power consumption was high but you can't forget that the FX-6300 was $100 for a >3-core chip that could be overclocked by another 0.7 GHz without issue. The price-performance ratio was better than anything Intel fielded. I'm still running it today.
  • adrian_b 4y ago
    Bulldozer has got a lot of hate mostly because of false advertising and because of a series of blog articles written by AMD marketing people before its launch in 2011, which created very wrong expectations about its characteristics. The wrong expectations and false advertising have centered on the fact that the first Bulldozer was described as an 8-core CPU, which would easily crush its 4-core competition from Intel (Sandy Bridge). What the AMD bloggers have forgotten to mention was that the new Bulldozer cores were much weaker than the cores of their previous CPU generations, being able to execute only 2 instructions per cycle, while an Intel core could execute 4 instructions per cycle (and the previous AMD cores could execute 3 instructions per cycle). So a Bulldozer core only had the performance of a single thread of the 2 threads of an Intel core, for multi-threaded tasks, with the additional disadvantage that the resources of 2 AMD cores could not be allocated to a single thread when the second core of a module was idle. So an 8-core Bulldozer could barely match the multi-threaded performance of a 4-core Sandy Bridge, while being much slower on single-thread tasks. If one would have known since the beginning that the Bulldozer cores had been intentionally designed to be much weaker than the old AMD cores and than the Intel cores, this would not have been a surprise and everybody for whom the price/performance ratio was more important than the performance would have been happy to buy Bulldozer CPUs. However, after many months during which AMD claimed that their supposedly 8-core CPU will be better than any other CPU with less cores, there was a huge disappointment caused by the first tests after launch, which immediately revealed the pathetic performance of the new cores, which for single-thread tasks were much slower than the previous AMD CPUs. So all the hate has been caused by the stupid actions of the AMD management and marketing, who lied continuously about Bulldozer, even if they should have thought that this is useless, because the independent benchmarks will reveal the truth immediately after launch. To set correctly the expectations about Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge, what AMD called a 4-module 8-core CPU should have been called a 4-core 8-thread CPU, but which has dynamic allocation inside a core (module in AMD jargon) only for the FPU, while the integer resources are allocated statically. With this correct description there would have been no surprise about the behavior of Bulldozer. A part of the hate is also due to some engineering decisions whose reasons are a mystery even now, because if you would have queried randomly a thousand of logic design engineers before 2011, all or almost all would have said that they are bad decisions, so it is hard to understand how they could be promoted and approved inside the AMD design teams. For example, since the Opteron launch in 2003 and until Intel launched Sandy Bridge in 2011, the largest advantage in performance of the AMD CPUs was in the computations with large numbers, because the AMD CPUs could do integer multiplications much faster than the Intel CPUs. The Intel designers have recognized that this is a problem, and during the 2006-2011 interval they have decreased every year the number of clock cycles required for operations like multiplications and divisions, so that Penryn began to approach the AMD throughput per clock cycle, Nehalem & Westmere matched the AMD throughput, while Sandy Bridge achieved a double throughput in comparison with the old AMD CPUs. While Intel worked diligently to improve the performance of their cores, what did AMD do ? Someone at AMD has decided for an unknown reason that there is no need for Bulldozer to keep their existing computational performance, but it is enough to have integer multipliers with a throughput equal to a half of their current throughput and equal to only a quarter of their Sandy Bridge competitor (Intel had announced much in advance, by more than a year before launch, that Sandy Bridge will double the integer multiplication throughput over Nehalem, and it was anyway an obvious trend of the evolution of their previous cores; so the higher performance of the competition could not have been a surprise for the AMD designers). The downgraded integer multipliers have crippled the performance of the new AMD CPUs for certain applications where their previous CPUs had been the best, while enabling only a negligible reduction in the core area.
• djmips 4y ago
  the Cell processor in the PS3 was not terrible in the PS3 and I doubt you ever worked on it. So talk about 'not the best-researched'. You can find many people singing it's praises, including me.
  • shadowofneptune 4y ago
    It probably was spectacular once you knew how to work with it. Like the Atari Jaguar though, getting the performance needed out of such a highly parallel architecture took a lot of time and investment. With cross-platform games really taking off during that time, it was a strategic mistake IMO.
  • hajile 4y ago
    For every person singing it's praises, there are dozens of game developers who were singing with gladness when it was gone. The PS3 devs I've spoken with (you aside) universally hated the platform and spoke of how much more dev time it took to launch games on the platform to achieve mediocre results. If the chip were so wonderful to work on, then it would still be in use today as the theoretical performance per area beats everything else by a wide margin. Roadrunner was built in 2008. It would still be just barely off the top 500 list in 2021, but was decommissioned just FIVE years later in 2013. Its x86 replacement was already underway in 2010 TWO years after its launch. I'm glad you got to work with the architecture you loved for so many years, but I think the rest of the world disagrees with your assessment.
  • cbozeman 4y ago
    That's an enthralling tale, but perhaps you could share why you feel it deserved praise-singing to begin with, and also what titles you worked on, considering many developers were complaining about it when it was current console architecture, and you don't even need to do much of a Google Search to find people bitching about it.
    • djmips 4y ago
      >Google Search to find people bitching about it. Seriously? You can find people bitching about anything on Google Search. The fact is most people just weren't prepared for multi-core data oriented programming in 2006. List my titles: no you first
• JJMcJ 4y ago
  It seems like Intel was in some ways like Microsoft. Their revenues were so high that they could survive spectacular failures and still keep going.
• flyinghamster 4y ago
  I was also surprised the iAPX 432 wasn't on the list. It seems to be the Itanium's grandaddy. It was expensive, targeted to enterprises rather than everyone, tried to push the boundaries (32-bit for the 432, 64-bit for Itanium), and relied on VLIW instruction sets that were beyond the capabilities of compilers. The resemblance is striking. As for Bulldozer, I was saddled with one for a while. Where it really fell down was (surprise!) its floating point performance. That FPU shared between two integer units makes for some "interesting" performance characteristics when trying to run multiple FP-heavy tasks, but overall, it was merely mediocre rather than terrible. I'm glad AMD hit it out of the park with Zen.
• musicale 4y ago
  Personally I can find something to like in most architectures. Cell (for example) was an asymmetric/hybrid multicore CPU; Apple Silicon is perhaps a modern example of asymmetric performance vs. efficiency cores, and also features special-purpose accelerator cores such as the neural engine. The 432 had capability-based addressing. Speed-over-security has had a good run, but with some disastrous consequences. We may be seeing the return of capabilities with CHERI/ARM. The 960 was an early superscalar design, supported tag bits, and was also a successful product.
  • chasil 4y ago
    Obligatory mention: "RISC instruction sets I have known and disliked." https://www.jwhitham.org//2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-have-known-and.html https://www.jwhitham.org//2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-ha... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607119 I might also say that Sun's UltraSPARC was constantly beaten by Fujitsu SuperSPARC. It would have been better to outsource.
    • pinewurst 4y ago
      SuperSPARC was an earlier TI manufactured part. Fujitsu was (and I think still is) SPARC64, which was a nice series of parts, originally designed by HAL. I used to own a Fujitsu server - fast and built like a brick outhouse.
• sanguy 4y ago
  i860 did well in embedded applications and for awhile was the mainstay in most RAID controllers and network communication processors. Not what Intel wanted from it but it did have a long life in such applications. I spent many years working on the i860 and i960 and learned to live with its oddities. As for the Cell it was overly complex architecture and had remarkable performance under very optimized code. The hope was hand tuned libraries would address this; and compiler optimizations would take care of the rest. Neither happened in a meaningful way. We did two major projects with the Cell using it for real-time HDTV compression/direct broadcast applications. Another one not on the list was the inmos Transputer. Again similar to the Cell; very complex and fast for its time; but not easy to achieve this performance. That was my first job as an EE - we used it on a GPS receiver ISA card in the early days of GPS. It was a good choice as very fast and could keep up with the signal processing that allowed us to roll code updates to add major features as various changes to GPS signals were rolled out (P-code on L2, SA being turned off, and later CA code on L2 being unencrypted). Our competitors had to redesign ASICS to get these new features which means long product cycles and hardware replacement. Today I find myself doing a lot on the M1 series, as well as Epyc. Now you can give zero shits about clean optimized code and it still runs amazingly fast. Last time I had to do assembler or intrinsics was many many years ago - and I sort of miss that intimacy with the hardware to get the most out of it.
  • pinewurst 4y ago
    I think you mean 960 in RAID and comm controllers. The 860 had incredibly bad, almost unbelievably slow context switches. You’d never ever use it in a controller. A dedicated render pipeline is pretty all it was good for, for some value of ‘good’.
    • notacoward 4y ago
      I had the same reaction. The i860 and i960 were very different beasts. I owned an 860-based Oki/Stardent workstation, bought for peanuts at the latter company's fire sale, for a while. Later I found the 960CA (in particular) in many storage/network devices. So I kind of know both, but I would never speak of them as if they were the same. Other than sharing a corporate logo, they had little to do with one another.
• RachelF 4y ago
  Yeah, it's good, but the author forgets to mention some other bad chips from before the late 1990's - The Intel i432 - too far ahead of its time, in Itanium for the 1980's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 - The TI CMS320 series of DSPs. So full of silicon bugs it hurt TI badly. - The Transputer T9000 - very ambitious, but vapourware for so long it killed its parent company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer#T9000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer#T9000
• voldacar 4y ago
  What games were able to make full use of the Cell?
• Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  "We now know that core 2 dropped all kinds of safety features resulting in the Meltdown vulnerabilities." Curiously, every other out-of-order chip designer except for AMD also designed CPUs with Meltdown flaws. That's per their own documentation ARM, IBM both Power and mainframe, SPARC, and I think MIPS but they weren't entirely clear about it.