I got an announcement in today's mail advertising "Intel's Merced
and IA-64: Technology and Market Forecast," by Linley Gwennap, editor
of Microprocessor Report, and to be published by MicroDesign Resources
(www.mdronline.com). MDR claims the above to be
"The authoritative analysis of Intel's new microprocessor
architecture from the industry's most trusted source."
They also drop tantalizing hints about
"...the fledgling chip's strengths and its critical weaknesses."
>From the IA-64 register set figure in the advert, one weakness appears to me
to be the sheer amount of silicon: Intel is going from just 8 FP registers
in all the Pentium incarnations to a whopping 128, each still having the
x86's full 80 bits, in the IA-64 There are also 128 65-bit general purpose
(64-bit integer plus carry bit) registers. This raises several questions:
1) How does Intel expect to be able to maintain anything approaching their
current price advantage over other (already existing) high-end chips with
this much Silicon in the IA-64?
2) What use are so many registers without a major increase in the number
of functional units? (I believe IA-64 still has 1 FP adder, 1FP multiplier,
perhaps 2 64-bit integer units, the latter having been a longstanding feature
of e.g. Alpha and MIPS, which both have excellent integer functionality
and neither has 128 integer registers.)
Sure, lots of registers is nice for out-of-order execution (OOE), but even
an OOE monster like the Alpha 21264 has "just" 80 FP registers, each of just
64 bits - IA-64 will have double the silicon here!
The aforementioned book is pricey: $995 before 31 May, but additional
copies are "only" $295. Microprocessor Report subscribers get $100 off
either of these figures. At a potential $195 a copy, perhaps if one of
the readers of this list is a subscriber, there might be enough interest
for a volume order?
Or, perhaps there's a better/cheaper place to obtain the relevant technical
information?
-Ernst
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