I'll take you on a different front.
I'll agree that X86 is a cluttered mess. But that STILL doesn't mean
that IA64 is better. IMHO IA64 was something like an academic that
rebadged VLIW as EPIC and sold it to management. At any particular
time, the *newest* chip out there will tend to have the best benchmarks
as IA64 does, now. But for BILLIONS in investment and a decade in
development, they didn't leapfrog squat, just got to the 'normal'
leading position. Non cost-effective.
Easy for you to say. If anyone accurately foresaw the importance of
OoO and just exactly _why_ it would be so important _before_ it was
introduced into common usage, I should be very much indebted to anyone
who can direct me to an appropriate link (who knows, maybe such a link
exists). Run-time scheduling may or may not prove in the long run to
play the critical role that it currently does, so I'm not going to
make any emphatic statements that purport to be true for all time.
People have tried every conceivable scheme for scheduling, and right
now, on-die runtime scheduling appears to be the winner.
IA64 is saddled with an instruction set that makes OoO very hard, but
not impossible. OoO also makes nonsense of the premise of the IA64
ISA, which is that all the scheduling was to be preprogrammed, using
predicated instructions to make whatever run-time adjustments were
necessary. The scheme works _much_ better than people give it credit
for. The problem is that you only need a cache miss rate of less than
one percent to produce a factor of two slowdown in code execution
given the current mismatch between processor speed and memory latency.
Only the slightest miscalculation can bring you to ruin, and that's
why IA64 needs such a gigantic cache to perform decently.
Intel designed IA64 so that it would be very hard to clone. That, and
making sure that it could not be construed as subject to any of their
cross-licensing agreements, not performance, was their primary design
goal. As it stands _at_the_moment_, Intel seems to have succeeded
beyond its wildest expectations in those respects. It also happens to
have produced a world-beating processor for certain applications. It
can't be cloned, it isn't subject to cross-licensing agreements, and
it can be virtualized.
What makes you think you're so smart?
RM