[Info-vax] HPE Integrity emulator

[Scott Dorsey]

Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>Before it was considered a bad idea, it was still available.  They are still 
>available used.  I got one which hasn't been powered on in months.  Want it?
>
>Emulators allowed use of discontinued architectures that people actually wanted
>to run.  I don't know anyone who really wants to run an itanic.  Do you?

Well, that's sort of the thing.  MAYBE the Itanium might actually have been
a viable architecture if the compilers could have been made smart enough.  
But this turned out to be a whole lot harder than the Intel crew expected.

The idea was that with the long instruction word, compilers could have 
multiple operations taking place across the chip in ways that pipelining
microcoded machines could not do.  But in fact, the actual utilization of
processor elements was much worse when it actually came down to the wire.
Could this have been corrected with smarter compilers?  That's the question
nobody can really answer.  And now there is no interest in answering it.
--scott


-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."