alt Hacker NewsMy point was most modern software developers still do not understand systems at an architectural level. I don't buy the VLIW paradigm was inherently inferior argument, but the code written for it with mystery failure modes at the time was a mess.
And ia64 was only around 23% slower and several times more costly than amd64 options at the time. Both toads had their warts, but one was actually usable by mere mortals.
Its true just about everything either ran slow on not at all on ia64... Thankfully, we were still running Sparc based platforms at that time, as the Intel clown-show still looked like more work. But I do empathize with the ia64 trauma, as the roll out had a lot of collateral damage in some firms as people started jumping ship early to avoid accountability. =3
One immediate advantage that rescheduling-capable cores have that rigid compiler-based ones don’t nor ever would is that reschedules can notice patterns in execution in the current context and keep the ALU fed from well-provisioned caches even going as far as speculative execution. IA-64 and typeless or typed-at-runtime (JIT scripts, for example, like JavaScript or Python) would’ve been implemented very differently on Itanium.