Re: IA64

["Christopher C. Chimelis" <chris@debian.org>]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2000, John Leuner wrote:

> As a non-Alpha user (but an aspirant one), I'm curious to know how the
> 'community' sees IA64? Is it perceived as a threat? Would alpha users
> be persuaded to switch over easily?

I, for one, am excited about having a 64-bit Intel chip out there for a
lot of reasons.  For one, it'll make porting much easier since most
software authors will know the issues involved (rather than assume that
the whole world is 32-bit, like they do now) and write things
properly.  Also, I think the competition may be good for Alpha since it'll
bring more attention to the 64-bit market.  Right now, clock speed seems
to be what people look at rather than performance and I really hope that
changes (in my experience, a similarly-clocked Alpha can easily outperform
Intel's current offerings in almost every area).

On the downside, however, Intel's clout and manufacturing volume could
spell trouble for Alpha.  Since we don't really know what the pricepoint
on the Intels will be, it's hard to tell what effect their introduction
will have on the Alpha market, but one thing's for sure: Intel's bound to
try to undercut the Alpha prices.  It's going to be interesting.  I'm also
curious to see how well FP performance is compared to Alphas (haven't seen
a side-by-side comparison yet).  Alpha still may reign in the scientific
market in the long run if the FP performance is still higher than Intel's.

> How do the free software compiler-writer people feel about the
> architecture?

I agree with the other statements made about gcc's support for IA64 (at
least for now).  It's certainly going to be a bit before gcc optimises
well for IA64, especially since it's just recently gotten better (albeit
still not great) for 64-bit processors in general.  The unique pipelining
of the IA64 architecture makes this even uglier, though, so I'm very glad
to not have gotten involved in that port yet :-P

SGI's compilers are much better, as previously stated, mostly because of
SGI's experience with 64-bit issues (WRT to MIPS) and they've actually got
some really good people in their compiler area.  I just doubt that their
compiler will be more prominent (or take over) gcc's slot as the premiere
Linux compiler any time soon.  I'm hoping they donate more to gcc to make
it better since SGI doesn't turn much business from selling/supporting
compilers, even on their own machines.

I could go on and on about this, but I won't in the interest of brevity
:-)

At any rate, IA64 is coming and, yes, I wouldn't mind having one, but what
it does to Alpha remains to be seen, I guess.

C