From: Liam Bedford (lbedford at domain lbedford.org)
Date: Thu 16 Aug 2001 - 16:58:53 IST
On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 04:49:01PM +0100, Matthew French came forth with:
> On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 04:32:07PM +0100, jac1 wrote:
> > >no, but funnily enough alpha cpus do something like this with
> > >'packets' of two or four instructions that get issued
> > >simultaneously to parallel pipelines. but that's another story :)
> >
> > Pentiums are dual-pipelined aren't they? To make matters worse,
> > some instructions (i387) can only be executed on a certain pipeline
> > (the v one IIRC)! Fairly headwrecking stuff if you're to do it by
> > hand, which is the main reason hardly anything, bar hardware stuff,
> > is done in asm. Compilers do a good enough job of it.
>
> As I understand it, one of the reasons Intel took over control of the
> Alpha chip was so that they could have access to Digital's compiler
> technology - presumably because the Itanium also has a fairly complex
> pipeline structure.
>
fairly complex? :)
Itanic is the chip that lives by its compilers (more so than any other
chip). If you try to run x86 code, it runs like a P150 or so, if you run
unoptimized code, it's a complete waste of money (like XP for IA64 for
example).
It'll be interesting to see how they divest themselves of the technology (by
just forgetting that they have it or something similar) they got from Compaq
(or if anyone else takes up the non-exclusive part of the rights)
L.
--
dBP dBBBBb | If you're looking at me to be an accountant
dBP | Then you will look but you will never see
dBP dBBBK' | If you're looking at me to start having babies
dBP dB' db | Then you can wish because I'm not here to fool around
dBBBBP dBBBBP' | Belle & Sebastian (Family Tree)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:11:42 GMT