AMD Killed the Itanium

Re:AMD Killed the Itanium by moonchild on Saturday February 04, 2023 @07:51AM (#34654074)

Applications tend to exhibit a lot of dynamic behaviour. Consider any graph munger. I do expect there is an interesting subset of applications, particularly those that have fairly narrow scope and that have been highly optimised, which could be effectively statically scheduled. But for general-purpose computation, I don't buy it.

Perhaps as part of the trend towards increasingly heterogeneous architectures, we'll see big VLIW coprocessors for power efficiency in certain serial workloads (GPUs are massively parallel but little VLIW coprocessors; however, they do have dynamic scheduling).

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Re:AMD Killed the Itanium by killerstorm on Saturday February 04, 2023 @03:01PM (#34657611)

Itanium also does dynamic scheduling. It's not really VLIW - it is just optimized to decode and schedule a lot of instructions at once.

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Re:AMD Killed the Itanium by FullyFunctional on Saturday February 04, 2023 @06:48PM (#34659763)

That’s not what dynamic scheduling means. What you need is to dynamically extract ILP so you can get good performance on single thread applications in light of branch mispredictions and cache misses. We are talking SPECint, not SPECfp nor throughput (threading). x86 chips and Apple Silicon show what you can do here and to do that with IA-64 would have beem harder, not easier.

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