Hi, > As a non-Alpha user (but an aspirant one), I'm curious to know how the > 'community' sees IA64? Is it perceived as a threat? Would alpha users > be persuaded to switch over easily?
The IA64 is very agreesive and new design wrt to microarchitecture. As ooposed to that, Alpha (21264) is a state-of-art "traditional" architecture, which is already 64bit and performs quite well. Based on my experience, Alpha delivers, what you pay for: superior performance at a superior price-tag ;-) The linux port to Alpha ( which is, what I use all of the time ) if proven, reliable and stable. Although GCC on Alpha is crap, the freely available Compaq-Compilers for Linux/Alpha do *very* well. Important to me is workstation-class firmware: seriel consoles, netboot, decent development support and console-callbacks, a fair set of diagnostics. However, this counts for me, YMMV. Based on my experience of Linux/IA64 on a dual IA64 prototype, performance is - at the moment - fairly poor, compared to a dual 21264. Of course, this is due to a lousy and unoptimized pre-production run of the sillicon. At the moment, no one can *really* tell how fast an IA64 will be. Too much of the performance will also come from the surrounding chipset, like memory and I/O buses. GCC on IA64 sucks, period. GCC has no means of optimizing towards a performant sequence of instruction-packets to be fed into the IA64 pipeline. The SGI compilers, which are free as well, do a much better job. I don't see any advantage on either side of the fence here - although the Compaq compilers appear very mature, from what I have seen so far. I can tell far less on behalf the SGI Compilers. As for the Firmware stuff, I am *very* pleased how Compaq/Alpha handle things. They emulate x86-Bioses of standart I/O cards upon POST, which basically allows users to stuff an Alpha with a decent set of PCI Boards cheaply available on the market. As for IA64, I cannot tell how Intel will handle this - it might well be crucial for IA64's success. The same goes for the Firmware functionality in general. Intel has the unique opportunity of getting rid of the PC-crap, which is nothing more than a glorified DOS-loader, even by today. I assume, IA64 will not start in some real-mode and will not support Gate-A20. As for the future, I doubt the extensions like ISSE, 3DNOW or even MVI will persist. Instead, I could imagine, that having fast network-links on chip for large-scale parallel machines will be a key point for any architectures' success. This is planned on future Alphas, and I hope the Alpha team does this well. Putting a boat-load of ALU's in a VLIW architecture is also an interesting approach, but the validity of this concept will be proven in future IA64 versions, definitely not in the first run. The biggest threat for Alpha is - IMHO - Intels manufacturing capabilities. If they can run a 256Kbyte on-chip L2-cache, accessed 256bit wide, at 1 GHz, they sure have some superior fabs at hand. If they can turn that advantage over to IA64, Alpha is in *serious* trouble. Given Intel's ability roll-out huge amounts on chips, along with their financial backing, I am certain they will try to buy-in the server market on price, if the acceptance of the IA64 does not develop fast enough in their opinion. Whatever comes in the near or far future, Alpha is here already. It's proven, it's fast and I can actually *buy it*. I doubt, Intel will make it in the first attempt, but I assume future generations of the IA64 will be *very* interesting - but yet, this remains to be proven. Since I have no religious or whaterver bias towards Intel, I don't really care. I would like to see Alpha succeed, since I think it's a Good Thing(TM). Just my $.02 Sincerely, Thomas Weyergraf -- Thomas Weyergraf [EMAIL PROTECTED] My Favorite IA64 Opcode-guess ( see arch/ia64/lib/memset.S ) "br.ret.spnt.few" - got back from getting beer, did not spend a lot.
