151–160 of 211 posts
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> the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. I think the i432 would be a worthy challenger to that title https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432
I think of the iAPX 432 as "over-designed and under-engineered". Intel was writing architectural checks (bit-aligned instructions, capability-based permissions, "everything is an object") they couldn't cash (very, very bad performance). I'm a software guy, so naturally I took a course in VLSI design in college. It was fun. This was maybe a year before the iAPX 432 was canceled; our teacher had some sample chips embed…
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…
x86-64 is anything but "boring" and "safe". :) Real mode, Mod R/M and SIB byte encoding weirdness, REX prefixes, 80-bit floats, parity flag, hard-wired registers for shifts/multiplies/divisions, builtin CRC32 over the wrong polynomial, Pascal calling convention support, binary-coded decimal, high halves of 16-bit registers, MMX overlap with x87 floating point, etc. etc.
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I think Fuchsia exists mostly to keep talented OS research people busy and make them stay at the company.
It would be an awful waste of talent if it's just busy work.
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Let’s be honest: the only reason Fuschia exists, is so Google can ship a Android-platform 100% free of GPL-code in the future. There’s nothing in it for anyone else.
How is Android limited by GPL?
Giving Android away to OEMs is in large part a vector to get the Play store, Chrome, Maps, and their monetizable services and data scarfing on the device.
But some OEMs don't bundle everything. Think of the de-Googled Android variant ran by the Kindle Fire series, or the Chinese phones that include local stores and service providers that work there instead. Google can try to bludgeon them into playing ball with the trademark and various over-the-top agreements, but they can't stop them from saying "We'll take AOSP and make our own version and call it FireOS."
With full licensing control up and down the stack, they can close that door much tighter.
From almost exactly ten years ago: How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp > The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it? > The failure of this chip to…
His schtick seems to be "angry man shouting about how new things suck."
He is the bizarro world version of Steven Levy: his default is why something is bad, instead of seeing the possibilities.
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Being a couple years late definitely was bad but they also completely blew the performance, especially for ia32 compatibility. Shipping on time would have made the performance gap less bad but I rarely saw it being competitive with what would have been the competition at that time even before you factored cost in. Unless your workload was just Intel’s hand-tuned assembly it was usually cheaper to buy 2 x86 boxes and…
You're absolutely right, hence my hesitancy. IA-32 emulation performance was one particular weak spot. A fellow analyst at the time said something along the lines of "Itanium's IA-32 performance was not only not in the ballpark; it was not in the parking lot outside the ballpark." Itanium was also, in many ways, designed for a world where ILP, rather than TLP, ruled. That distinction wouldn't become terribly importan…
If we switch from the "Every year the clock rate goes up 30%" model to "50% more cores every year", you're going to trigger the "recompile the universe" event. This is an esistential-level threat for the Microsoft of 15 years ago.
Microsoft's biggest selling point for years was the backwards compatibility. Keep running that old software forever, and the magic of Intel running the clock up means it still gets faster every year.
If that train stops, you may well think "if I have to rebuild anyway to support many-cores, why not do so on Linux?"
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…
I got to work with one of the first Itanium machines back in 2000 working as an intern. My job was to port Perl to IA-64. It was an amazingly fast machine - like living a few years into the future. I can see why it failed to gain mass traction, but that’s a shame. IA-64 was so innovative.