Re:AMD Killed the Itanium
by FullyFunctional on Saturday February 04, 2023 @06:50PM
(#34659780)
compiler technology doesn’t help when cache misses and branches aren’t predictable. That’s the fatal flaw.
Spot on. I think it's also important to point out that "the compiler will fix it" line wasn't new with Itanic. The Multiflow guys (for one) said the same thing for their Trace line of VLIW machines 15 years or so before HP & Intel, and that didn't work so well. So now, 40 years down the line, can the compiler really fix it, or do we acknowledge that maybe some things are theoretically nifty but don't work out in practice and move on? I don't know the answer to that, but I have my suspicions.
Which would be fine if there was a time machine available to send back what we know now to the past. But at the time having sucky compilers for what you want to (try to) accomplish was a bad idea.
The same decision now may be good, but then it was a mistake. It'd be like trying to have a Moon landing project in the 1920s: we got there eventually, but certain things are only possible when the time 'is right'.