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I would guess the "actively hostile" part had a lot to do with all the time and effort to get the compiler to make good use of Itanium. Hard to focus on develo
by tyingq 3y ago
I would guess the "actively hostile" part had a lot to do with all the time and effort to get the compiler to make good use of Itanium. Hard to focus on developers without that foundation. And they never got there.
- rbanffy 3y agoNot having a good C compiler is pretty much a blocker for any general purpose processor being successfully released. If you can't run actual software faster than your competition, your theoretical benefits remain just that.
- tyingq 3y agoTo give them some grace, it compiled "made for VLIW" code for Itanium well, where it would reap the benefits. It couldn't do much with existing code to make it efficient.
- rbanffy 3y agoWhat does "made for VLIW" imply? Using intrinsics?
- tyingq 3y agoSome combination of strategies. Grabbing an old Itanium Developer's manual, the suggested rewrites include making loops branchless where possible, balancing instruction depth for branches that can't be avoided, doing more comparisons in parallel rather than if X -> then if Y, and so on. Obviously, this doesn't apply to every general purpose problem. Just noting there were some narrow cases where writing for Itanium produced something close to the promise.
- rbanffy 3y agoJust downloaded their manuals. Should be an interesting read. I remember their Xeon Phi ones were very nice as well. I miss those machines.