Hacker News Reader

One minor quibble. Intel pushed Itaniums hard at on point. The machines were huge and I had to have additional power routed to my office to run it. Thankfully AMD introduced the x64 architecture and the PC industry was saved. Between the power consumption of the Itanium and how hard the IA64 assembly was to debug. I atleast welcomed the X64 architecture.

View on HN

IA64 assembly was "hard" because it wasn't expected to be something that humans would write or debug routinely - it was basically meant for compilers.

This also describes VLIW architectures more generally, and even more so wrt. current speculative developments like Mill, which AIUI doesn't even have a single, standardized "machine-level" assembly; what the machine runs at its lowest level is only defined by your actual chip configuration. (It is understood that GPU compute works much the same way, with the GPU driver acting as a "compiler" of sorts.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com