From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 17 18:58:27 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from chmod.ath.cx (CC2-861.charter-stl.com [24.217.115.99]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 48E5637B424 for ; Tue, 17 Apr 2001 18:58:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ajh3@chmod.ath.cx) Received: by chmod.ath.cx (Postfix, from userid 1001) id CDFC3A91E; Tue, 17 Apr 2001 20:57:11 -0500 (CDT) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 20:57:11 -0500 From: Andrew Hesford To: Jeremiah Gowdy Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: x86-64 Hammer and IA64 Itainium Message-ID: <20010417205711.C64757@cec.wustl.edu> References: <200104171836.LAA06378@akira.lanfear.com> <000001c0c777$f9529b30$215778d8@cx443070b> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <000001c0c777$f9529b30$215778d8@cx443070b>; from jgowdy@home.com on Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 12:49:04PM -0700 X-Loop: Andrew Hesford Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 12:49:04PM -0700, Jeremiah Gowdy wrote: > I would love to see FreeBSD running natively (64bit) under the x86-64 > architecture, and unlike the Itainium, it's differences with x86-32 > seem to be few (of course). > Porting FreeBSD to Itainium would/will/could be a much much larger > project than the port to x86-64. First things first... paragraphs would be nice. Large chunks of words are hard to read. Second, it is this difference from x86 that I think is justification enough to focus on Itanium rather than x86-64. I'm not sure exactly how x86-64 works, but it seems to me that it's simply the standard x86 architecture expanded to 64 bits. Isn't time we kill the x86? It's been around too long. I'm not sure how the Itanium looks, and I'm no Intel freak, but a change would be nice. We should begin moving in the direction of RISC (or at least VLIW). There's a reason every other processor has a radically different architecture. Motorola, Sun and Digital all broke new ground with their processors, because the x86 doesn't amount to all that much any more. Remember, this technology was designed for 20-year old computers. You can probably tell I'm not one to say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." My general attitude is that even if it works great, new possibilities should be explored if they promise something better. Now is our chance. Focus main development on Alpha and Itanium (ideally, major focus should be put on UltraSPARC and PPC, too), and leave the x86-64 porting to people who actually care. -- Andrew Hesford ajh3@chmod.ath.cx To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message