[Info-vax] Dvorak on Itanic

[Tom Linden]

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:45:15 -0800, Paul  
<paul-nospamatall.raulerson at mac.com> wrote:

> On 2009-01-28 11:10:28 -0600, cook at wvnvms.wvnet.edu (George Cook) said:
>
>> In article <op.uohb97imhv4qyg at murphus.hsd1.ca.comcast.net>, "Tom  
>> Linden" <tom at kednos.company> writes:
>>> On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:10:04 -0800, David Mathog <mathog at caltech.edu>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>>>>> John Smith (not the one @ HP) wrote:
>>>>>> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp
>>>>
>>>>> Itanic toes seem to have been "sailing under a curse".
>>>>  Well, in terms of actually getting out the door and working as  
>>>> promised,
>>>> sure.  But in one sense it was immensely blessed.  Throughout all of
>>>> this nonsense, where all the computer manufacturers were not only
>>>> talking about deemphasizing their own CPUs, but in some cases (MIPS,
>>>> Alpha) actually doing so, and pinning future development on Intel's
>>>> great white hope, there was no anti-trust action whatsoever.  Not  
>>>> even a
>>>> hint of it.  Were not there actions more than a little  
>>>> anticompetitive?
>>>> To me it seems analogous to the hypothetical situation where Lexmark,
>>>> Canon, and HP, announce that henceforth all of their printers would  
>>>> only
>>>> use Epson print cartridges.
>>>>  The only company that didn't buy into this nonsense was AMD.  Now  
>>>> that
>>>> may have been because Intel wouldn't let them in on the party, but in
>>>> any case, they had to respond, and eventually pushed the Opteron out  
>>>> the
>>>> door, thereby showing everybody just how naked the Emperor really was.
>>>> The rest is history.
>>>>  Regards,
>>>>  David Mathog
>>>>
>>>  IIRC this started as an HP poject.  One of Jack Davidson's grad  
>>> students
>>> got
>>> hired by HP ca. 1992 to work on the VLIW arch, and don't forget that a
>>> couple
>>  Well, that explains a lot.  Having once been a grad student, I can
>> understand how one fresh out of grad school with no real world
>> experience could have come up with such an unworkable grandiose pie
>> in the sky idea based on nothing but theory.  I had always assumed
>> it was dreamed up by some extremely incompetent electronics engineers.
>>
>>> of years ago HP committed to putting in another $3B to the Intel  
>>> effort,
>>> so in
>>> some ways I think Intel got suckered, although the $3B would mitigate  
>>> the
>>> pain.
>>  Suckered?  Maybe, but I suspect Intel also used grad students and
>> incompetent engineers who agreed that it was the "end all be all"
>> of CPU architectures.
>>  The part I still don't understand is how the otherwise apparently
>> very competent Alpha CPU architects bought into it.  Must have been
>> the same type of irrational group think that got us into the current
>> economic mess.  Unfortunately there are few people who are able to
>> avoid the trap of "group think", Steve Jobs being one example, which
>> is why he is so critical to Apple's continued success.
>>   George Cook
>
> Oh, they didn't.  It is somewhat accurate to say that Itanium is a bit  
> of a
> bastardized descendent of the HP PA-RISC arch. HP was already developing
> it when they decided to partner with Intel.

Apollo, which HP acquired was also working on a risc chip, but I think the  
PA
group won out, don't know if any of theChelmsfords group concepts made it  
in
to PA-RISC

>
> In part for expertise, but more for cost purposes than anything else I  
> think.
>
> Alpha was just a casualty of the HP purchase, and its demise was
> based more on financial considerations than anything else.
>
> But in fact, the Itanium is one nicely designed chip from that point of  
> view.
> I like it. :)
>
> Now having said that, I really like PowerPC better, but that is in part
> because I am still a little bit of a mainframe bigot. PowerPC chips have
> similarities (intentional ones) that resemble a mainframe.
>
> The x86 chips just have, IMNSOH, an awful instruction set in comparison
> to Itanium and PowerPC, and incidentally, the VAX instruction set.

I have worked with quite a variety of instructions over the last 40 years
and there is none better than VAX, IMO.  As for risc Mips was probably the
best of that ilk, Power PC is a hybrid instruction set and is quite well
designed, specifically they considered how to run legacy code as well.  The
alpha designers were quite cavalier, one even told me once when I  
criticised
the design, "just rewrite the application" no business sense in that group,
but then that was the fault of the (apparently absent) management.

>
> -Paul
>



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