Originally posted by movieman
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Intel Has A Single-Chip Cloud Computer
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Originally posted by smitty3268 View PostMy guess is that Intel views Larrabee as a jumping point into the same HPC computing space that NVidia seems to be betting their company on, rather than just a video card. If you view the hardware as being for more general purposes and not just 3D acceleration then keeping the x86 ISA could become a selling point.
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Originally posted by movieman View PostOf course they may decide never to build a second version with the lessons they've learned from this one, but they haven't killed Itanium yet so Larrabee may still be with us a decade or two from now.
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Originally posted by deanjo View PostAlso given that Itanic is being effectively being kept 'alive' (and I really use that term generously) by HP, I would say it has been for all intense purposes dead for years. Last chip was built on 90nm and it's successor has yet to be seen. Compaq kept Alpha 'alive' for years too and we all know what happened to it.
There are very good reasons for maintaining several major architectures. Itanic may have it's problems, but if you killed it completely, it would be a loss for anyone interested in diversity in IT.
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Originally posted by RobbieAB View PostYeah, Intel bought Alpha and killed it...
There are very good reasons for maintaining several major architectures. Itanic may have it's problems, but if you killed it completely, it would be a loss for anyone interested in diversity in IT.Last edited by deanjo; 05 December 2009, 06:56 PM.
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Well... IA64 was also being beaten by Alpha until Intel bought and killed it. IA64 had major issues, but if we consider the number of "big chip" designs now against 10 years ago, it's a worrying trend. Alpha and MIPS effectively dead, PPC PPC, Sparc, and IA64 essentially gone from the workstation market. AMD64, good as it is, is still carrying handicaps deriving from it's x86 origins. Admittedly, Itanic is a tad irrelevant in the context of that trend as it's an Intel chip.
On a different level, one has to wonder how much Intel learned from the Itanic project which has since been fed back into their x86(_64) chip range.
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Originally posted by smitty3268 View PostIf you view the hardware as being for more general purposes and not just 3D acceleration then keeping the x86 ISA could become a selling point.
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Originally posted by RobbieAB View PostOn a different level, one has to wonder how much Intel learned from the Itanic project which has since been fed back into their x86(_64) chip range.
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Originally posted by movieman View PostBut if you're going to have to recompile anyway, then you don't care what the underlying instruction set is, just how fast it can execute your code; which will almost certainly be faster if you can eliminate all those transistors and pipeline stages required to decode the complex x86 instruction set.
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Originally posted by Ant P. View PostMakes me wonder... if x86 is such a bad thing, why has nobody yet produced an x86 chip where you can switch off the translation layer?
Essentially it takes the complex x86 instructions and turns them into a sequence of simple RISC-type instructions which can be dynamically decoded as they're executed. I don't know about AMD, but recent Intel chips cache the translated instructions so they don't need to decode x86 instructions all the time.
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