[rescue] SGI, MIPS, and IA-64

[Dave McGuire]

On February 14, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> >   The i860 was widely used as a high-speed embedded processor for many
> > applications, not the least of which are the SGI Reality Engine (eight
> > i860s for geometric stuff) and Reality Engine 2 (twelve i860s).  It
> > failed as a mainstream processor, however, primarily because it is
> > very difficult to program with any degree of efficiency.
> 
> Well, so far the ia-64 certainly isn't entering the mainstream.  What do you 
> think of this chip anyway?  It appears to be decent.

  I've not looked at it in-depth.  On the surface it just looks like
another overcomplicated intel processor.

> I think the bundles are cool (a bundle has 3 41bit instructions in them, which
> are guaranteed to execute simultaneously, to my understanding), plus for the
> most part it looks like IA-64 can execute 2 bundles at once (meaning 6 parallel
> instructions).

  Wow, six whole instructions...one more than the (several year old)
MIPS R10K.  Isn't Intel wonderful?

     -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL         "Less talk.  More synthohol." --Lt. Worf