51–60 of 155 posts
SGI, Compaq and HP mothballed development of their own CPUs (MIPS/Alpha/PA-RISC) as they all settled on Itanium for future products.
After Itanium turned out to be a flop, those companies adopted x86-64 - Intel killed off 3 competing ISAs by shipping a bad product.
This doesn't seem to be the best-researched article out there. If they thought Itanium was bad, they should have looked into the i860. Itanium was an attempt to fix a bunch of the i860 ideas. i860 quickly went from a supercomputer chip to a cheap DSP alternative (where it had at least the hope of hitting more than 10% of its theoretical performance). Intel iAPX 432 was preached as the second coming back in the 80s, b…
At least the 960 was somewhat usable. Many variants were created, and several were widely used in embedded products for quite a few years. The 860, however, was Just Crap. Full stop. End of story. IIRC it had weird double-instruction modes that compilers just couldn't handle, and if you used them anyway (for very necessary performance) then handling exceptions properly was all but impossible. Definitely gets my vote…
I'm so ashamed to have owned a Cyrix, a P4, and an AMD Bulldozer. They were all awful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My vote for worst CPU goes to the iAPX 432 (also not on this list).
Wow, a garbage collector implemented inside of the processor. Chip level support for objects. You can't fault Intel for their ambition here, just their common sense. And the whole thing is built for a world where everybody is writing code in Ada. I bet some compiler makers were salivating at the prospect of collecting all of those huge license fees from developers.
IMHO the x86 won out (an d is still with us) because of all the CISCs of its time it was the closest to RISC when memory started to get a lot faster (almost all instructions make at most 1 memory access, few esoteric memory operations etc)
As a system builder for a "custom computer shop" back in 1997/98, I came here just to make sure Cyrix was on the list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I think Itanium gets a lot of unnecessary slack. It really tried some exciting new ideas and clean concepts. Not all of those concepts were much of a win, but with the first chip arriving years late then there’s no wonder it was perceived as underwhelming from the get go (that would happen to any chip that’s late)
Funnily, I feel like SIMD instructions are slowly reinventing what the itanium did out of the box. I think a modern compiler could likely do a good job with itanium now-a-days. However, when it first came out, there simply wasn't the ability to keep those instruction batches full. Compiler tech was too far behind to work well with the hardware.
There are real gains to be had by using SIMD but it tends to be massively parallel data processing workloads with specially written SIMD code or even hand tuned assembly (image/video processing, neural networks) not just feeding in a source file and compiling with the SIMD flag to then realize meaningful gains.
That didn't last long. Like what, one generation?
Good.
(saying that, but I remember purchasing a dual Pentium II motherboard for 2 400 MHz CPUs to speed up 3DStudio 4 renderings under Windows NT4... xD)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My vote for worst CPU goes to the iAPX 432 (also not on this list).
Wow, a garbage collector implemented inside of the processor. Chip level support for objects. You can't fault Intel for their ambition here, just their common sense. And the whole thing is built for a world where everybody is writing code in Ada. I bet some compiler makers were salivating at the prospect of collecting all of those huge license fees from developers.
This doesn't seem to be the best-researched article out there. If they thought Itanium was bad, they should have looked into the i860. Itanium was an attempt to fix a bunch of the i860 ideas. i860 quickly went from a supercomputer chip to a cheap DSP alternative (where it had at least the hope of hitting more than 10% of its theoretical performance). Intel iAPX 432 was preached as the second coming back in the 80s, b…
the Cell processor in the PS3 was not terrible in the PS3 and I doubt you ever worked on it. So talk about 'not the best-researched'. You can find many people singing it's praises, including me.