Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 23:31:35 -0400 (EDT) From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, kdrobnac@mission.mvnc.edu Subject: Re: Intel Merced FreeBSD??? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9908302328290.369-100000@picnic.mat.net> In-Reply-To: <37CA00C4.95ACE5D7@softweyr.com>
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On Sun, 29 Aug 1999, Wes Peters wrote: > > Trying to model the IA64 would have been a Manhattan Project sized task. > > But they've had PLENTY of time. HP had the 64-bit architecture defined > and a simulator underway in 1994, when Intel joined the project. The > Merced, which is a specific chip model with the 64-bit architecture and > x86 emulator, was originally supposed to ship in late 1997. > > > Honestly, I am wondering about Intel and HP's ability to really produce > > a reliable chip that had as many difficult-to-model features as the IA64 > > is supposed to have. I think that's the real reason that it's not > > actually being sampled. Your point on the 860 is very correct, but if > > they *could* have brought the IA64 out today with the features that they > > have been promising (at the speed they promised) it would have made the > > PowerPC and the Alpha look ill > > Uh, no, HP has already admitted that when Merced ships it will be slower > than current-generation PA-RISC CPUs. Which means it will also be slower > than Alpha, PowerPC, and UltraSPARC processors you can buy now. I was looking at some of the features they've been promising. That's why I made the comment about the difficult of modelling, because they'd be harder than hell to do, but *if* they got it to work, I'd expect a speedup from the features that was all out of proportion to mere clock speed comparison factors. Some of those features would make much more effective use of superscalar features than is now possible. ---------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include any kind of voice or data chuckr@picnic.mat.net | communications topic, C programming, and Unix. 213 Lakeside Drive Apt T-1 | Greenbelt, MD 20770 | picnic.mat.net: FreeBSD/i386 (301) 220-2114 | jaunt.mat.net : FreeBSD/Alpha ---------------------------+----------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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