[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 27, 12:47 am, "John Reagan" <johnrrea... at earthlink.net> wrote:
> "Neil Rieck" <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote in message
>
> news:b9757ffd-1cc9-4a35-b566-14f11621a604 at d21g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
>
> >I agree. Besides, IA64 required new compiler technology which never
> >really materialized so it was all for nothing. At least DEC had
> >produced some pretty neat code generators for Alpha.
>
> Not sure on what you mean.  The same GEM code generator for Alpha is the one
> we use for Itanium.  You get all the optimizations you get on Alpha.  Does
> it take full advantage of all the Itanium additional features, no it does
> not.  But you get all the loop optimization, routine inlining, dataflow
> analysis, etc. that you get on Alpha.
>
> The code generater used by the HP-UX side is pretty darned good as well as
> the Intel code generator.  Both know how to use the various data and control
> speculation on the chip.  Have you looked at them at all?
>
> John

Sorry for the confusion but I was defending the move from VAX to Alpha
(or CISC to RISC). I have extensive programming experience with both
and can tell you that Alpha lived up to the hype. I've got zero
experience with Itanium (so far) but have heard from customers (here I
am talking exclusively about people who are not Itanium manufacturers
or salesmen) that it does not live up to the hype as far as speed is
concerned. That said, Itanium servers are already smaller and cheaper
than Alpha so all is not lost.

NSR