Re:AMD Killed the Itanium
by throwawaymaths on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:12AM
(#34653874)
Iirc caches mostly exist to help keep pipelines full. You could maybe imagine an architecture with deterministic memory access times from specified regions.
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Such architectures exist (e.g. for signal processing). They just aren't good for running general-purpose software.
Itanium sold, barely, and still has people using it. But, as you can imagine, not with general-purpose software.
By the 2nd or 3rd generation, Intel had made some changes that really improved performance a lot. Was the final generation of Itanium the 4th generation?
> You could maybe imagine an architecture with deterministic memory access times from specified regions.
Sure.
But it's very easy to level down. And almost impossible to level up.
Re:AMD Killed the Itanium
by anonymoushn on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:03PM
(#34659923)
> Iirc caches mostly exist to help keep pipelines full
You can find out by disabling the stride prefetcher and observing the 90+% performance regression in all your software!