On Sat, 21 Oct 2006 13:36:04 -0400 Jonathan Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ia64 is for itanium, which was > intel's horrid first attempt at a 64-bit successor to x86. I wouldn't call Itanium a successor to x86, any more than SPARC was (recall that early Sun boxes were x86). As you mentioned, it's a completely new architecture. All those years people have been bashing Intel for the limitations of x86 that have been retained for decades for compatibility reasons (limited register set, nasty CISC, ever-increasing instruction set) - they try to do the design-from-scratch thing and it just gets ignored. AMD jump in and do what Intel had always previously done - extend the existing architecture by bolting on extra stuff - and clean up in the marketplace (or at least, hit Intel hard). If you want to call any architecture horrid, I'd suggest x86, which from a programmer's perspective has evolved into a real mess. x86_64 alleviates some nastiness (register set is now workable, pc-relative addressing is possible), but adds some more of its own. Of all the processor architectures I've worked with, modern x86 is far and away the muckiest from the point of view of an embedded software engineer. -- Kevin F. Quinn
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