This looks fascinating - and "the real deal" (not crackpottery) but I'm hesitant about a number of items.
It seems like quite a reach to pick a 'latest and greatest' IA processor (why is this $885? Because it can be) as a point of contrast. We can hit half the performance envelope and/or about an eighth the price while keeping many of the features that make a desktop processor what it is (like, for example, a whopping big cache hierarchy). Picking on x86 seems like a good way of overstating the case; if we're getting a new architecture, we may as well pick on ARM or Tilera or what have you.
Am also, as an early believer in the Itanium, somewhat nervous about static scheduling for any purpose. Dynamic branch prediction is very accurate on today's architectures; this does not mean that static scheduling can emulate this accuracy and enjoy the benefits.
Comments
This looks fascinating - and "the real deal" (not crackpottery) but I'm hesitant about a number of items.
It seems like quite a reach to pick a 'latest and greatest' IA processor (why is this $885? Because it can be) as a point of contrast. We can hit half the performance envelope and/or about an eighth the price while keeping many of the features that make a desktop processor what it is (like, for example, a whopping big cache hierarchy). Picking on x86 seems like a good way of overstating the case; if we're getting a new architecture, we may as well pick on ARM or Tilera or what have you.
Am also, as an early believer in the Itanium, somewhat nervous about static scheduling for any purpose. Dynamic branch prediction is very accurate on today's architectures; this does not mean that static scheduling can emulate this accuracy and enjoy the benefits.