Re: [Tinycc-devel] (no subject)

[Dave Dodge]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 11:46:45AM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> Translation: Itanic sucks so badly that it takes a near-miraculous
> compiler to get even reasonable performance out of it, although we
> try to phrase it to seem like it's the compiler's fault.

Oh I'm not making any excuses for IA-64.  It comes to mind only
because I have to deal with it on a regular basis and most people have
no idea just how bizarre the IA-64 world is at the assembly level.
I'd love to have things like tcc working there but I'm not masochistic
enough to try porting it myself.

> There's plenty of hardware out there that can get better performance
> out of fewer transistors, fewer watts, and without requiring an
> NP-complete (or AI-complete) optimizer to hide its most obvious
> shortcomings.

The problem is that for the workloads where IA-64 is king, there's
things like huge core counts and RAM sizes that the other hardware
can't easily reach yet.  If AMD can get Opteron scaled up to those
levels, though, it'll probably be the final nail in Itanium's coffin.
Much of my IA-64 stuff is also designed to be buildable on x86_64, in
anticipation of that day.

                                                  -Dave Dodge