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The Grumpy Editor goes 64-bit

The Grumpy Editor goes 64-bit

Posted Apr 15, 2004 16:35 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor goes 64-bit by ewan
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor goes 64-bit

Itanium is in the different price domain. As to performance, I tried
Itanium-1 and wasn't impressed. Probably Itanium-2 is different.


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The Grumpy Editor goes 64-bit

Posted Apr 17, 2004 5:20 UTC (Sat) by ksmathers (subscriber, #2353) [Link]

As to performance, I tried Itanium-1 and wasn't impressed. Probably Itanium-2 is different.

Certainly I2 is improved, but not that much. A disadvantage of EPIC is that if your compiler isn't really good at optimizing for the instruction set, the CPU will spend most of its time idle. Itanium performance depends very heavily on being able to keep the instruction lines full, and since there is no intelligence in the CPU at all, it is up to the compiler to accomplish that parallelism.

Itanium can beat any other CPU out there, but without the parallelism afforded by an extremely customized compiler backend, it can also feel like molasses.

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