Am 06.06.2011 20:27, schrieb Orchid XP v8:
> On 06/06/2011 07:14 PM, clipka wrote:
>> Am 06.06.2011 19:40, schrieb Orchid XP v8:
>>
>>> I keep hoping that some day somebody will come up with a chip design
>>> that runs crappy old 16-bit MS-DOS stuff under software emulation, but
>>> runs real Big Boy software that people might give a damn about on a
>>> platform with a modern, coherant design. But apparently I'm just
>>> dreaming...
>>
>> That's what Intel tried with the Itanium.
>>
>> "I'm making a note here: Huge Success."
>
> As far as I can tell, the trouble with Itanium is that it had very, very
> poor performance. This is not much incentive to switch.
>
> (Which is surprising really, because on paper it looks like a really
> good design...)

Surprising?

The concept relied heavily on compile-time optimization, which may still 
have had room for optimization back then.

The CPU was designed to work with RAMbus, which turned out to have 
serious initial performance problems on the RAM chip side, and AFAIK 
never managed to catch up with improvements on the DDR protocol.

The CPU was a fairly fresh start, so there may have been significantly 
more room for improvement in the chip design than in contemporary x86 
designs.

I'm also not sure whether it was "very, very" poor performance.

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