Compilers for Itanium

Posted Jul 8, 2014 12:46 UTC (Tue) by james (subscriber, #1325)
In reply to: Compilers for Itanium by CChittleborough
Parent article: The CHERI capability model: Revisiting RISC in an age of risk (Light Blue Touchpaper)

I think your cynicism is misplaced. The preferred route was allegedly patents held by a joint Intel-HP company, which would presumably not have been covered by any cross-licensing deals Intel had.

Making a processor too complex for anyone else to clone means that it's too complex for you to make a compatible processor, when the time comes to replace the initial implementation.

(Also, Itanium was notably better at floating point performance than the integer workloads it mostly ended up running. The Fortran programs you mention sound like the sort of programs where compilers might be able to extract parallelism, either into EPIC or SSE models. But I'm very sure other subscribers know more about that than I do!)