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myself248

No love for itanium? Aww.

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I have never seen anyone have any love for Itanium.

It's such a beautiful architecture, but nobody seems to touch it and get out unharmed.

What about it is beautiful? There idea of VLIW?

Yes, the idea of optimising at compile time so you don't have to do OoO and get a simple but functional chip.

I think my stance on that is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22459095

I know this is sarcasm, but:

I personally never used Itanium, but the features it had at the time were very compelling. Unfortunately, it was too ambitious, and now it’s faster to do OOO execution instead of making the compiler do all the heavy lifting.

I don't think it every was a promising approach to let the compiler alone do that work. For one, it means that you basically have to recompile for every microarch, and the compiler needs all those details. But even then, the compiler can't fully predict cache behaviour etc. Which means ooo execution still is important.

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