Is it time to stop research in Computer Architecture ?
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From: Mayan Moudgill on 23 Oct 2009 07:48 Andy "Krazy" Glew wrote: > E.g. Terje, you're known to be a Larrabee fan. Can you vectorize CABAC? Not a chance. > For example: divide the image up into subblocks, and run CABAC on each > subblock in parallel. Problem is with the standard. H.264 specifies that the frame is CABAC encoded.
From: nmm1 on 23 Oct 2009 08:40 In article <n56dnSJGq7FwDnzXnZ2dnUVZ_hadnZ2d(a)metrocastcablevision.com>, Bill Todd <billtodd(a)metrocast.net> wrote: > >>> The fact that Itanic came so close to world domination *despite* its >>> abject failure to deliver on the promises that had seemed to make that >>> domination inevitable tends to prove that the attempt to bluff its way >>> to success was a daring and risky move but hardly an insane one. ... >> >> Not really. It was a lot further from that than the hype indicated. > >Not really. See below :-) >Consider, for example, just the VMS market (a not-inconsiderable annual >$4 billion system market all by itself before the Alphacide). ... The association of VMS and $4 billion with "world domination" in the late 1990s is amusing :-) Sorry, but .... >> It made practical headway in two areas, so let's consider them. >> >> HPC was its most successful area, and something like two sites tried >> it and rejected it for every one that delivered a service using it. > >The importance of HPC to real-world success of a platform is pretty >debatable. Even in the late 1990s, it had more influence than VMS. It's not the money, it's the USA military-industrial establishment, and the political power they wield. >> The other was Mission Critical computers for Big Business. > >Exactly. > > I met >> people from several of those, and they had all taken the position >> that they were going to run it in parallel with their existing >> systems for a year or more before making a decision. > >Which is what they would have done with virtually *any* new system, no >matter how wonderful it seemed: these people give new meaning to the >word 'cautious'. You missed the point of my posting. It wasn't that they were being cautious - they had taken a decision, and it was "not with a barge pole" - that's not something the technical people are even allowed to hint to outsiders, but I have been a future watcher for a long time now. Any other experience gets "How's it going" with "OK, but we're only part-way through our testing." And that wasn't just one company. >> My point here is that, if the Itanic had started to be pushed much >> harder, the real heavyweights would have joined the opposition. > >What earthly reason do you have to think that? IBM never lifted a >finger against Itanic but rather got on board early and shipped product >for several years. ... I was informally contacted by one important group, and had contacts with others. It wasn't quite like that .... My comment was based on gleanings of throw-away remarks from a large number of people in very important customers. A few explicitly said "over my dead body", but one hell of a lot hinted it, often by being quite open about everything else but clamming up about the Itanic. This was when they were using publicly available systems, so the draconian pre-release NDAs did not apply. Virtually none were in favour. >> It never had an earthly of doing what it was originally hyped to >> do (i.e. entirely replace x86). > >Save for the grace of AMD it still might have: without a credible, >inexpensive, and pervasive 64-bit alternative Intel could have just >waited until desktops began to demand 64-bit processors. No way. Sorry. HP had restarted the PA-RISC line by then, IBM had restarted POWER, MIPS was available for purchase (and there were many companies with the resources to take it over and restart it), SPARC was still very much alive, and doubtless there were other plots and plans. I don't think that you realise just how badly the IA64 behaved on desktop and similar workloads. Even Sun's SPARC (let alone Fujitsu's) beat it into a cocked hat. And I don't just mean performance, but usability and reliability. Regards, Nick Maclaren.
From: Joe Pfeiffer on 23 Oct 2009 09:39 "Andy \"Krazy\" Glew" <ag-news(a)patten-glew.net> writes: > Robert Myers wrote: >> On Oct 21, 11:54 pm, Joe Pfeiffer <pfeif...(a)cs.nmsu.edu> wrote: >>> We were sure supposed to take it seriously -- didn't Merced actually >>> have a i386 core on it when delivered? >> >> It had something or other, but PIII had to be in the works (Andy would >> know) and it would have stomped anything that came before. > > I am not aware of an Itanium shipped or proposed that had an "x86 core > on the side". > > There were proposals to have some special purpose hardware, like some > x86 instruction decoders that packed into VLIW instructions. I had thought it did -- clearly I thought wrong! There at least was a section of the die dedicated to "IA-32 Control", according to a photo in the Sharangpani and Arora paper. > >> That is to say, I find it hard to believe that anyone took Itanium >> seriously as an x86 competitor. > > I can assure you that it was sold that way to Intel senior management. -- As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously. (Benjamin Franklin)
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 23 Oct 2009 10:16 Bill Todd <billtodd(a)metrocast.net> writes: > Consider, for example, just the VMS market (a not-inconsiderable > annual $4 billion system market all by itself before the Alphacide). > When Alpha got the axe in mid-2001, Compaq mounted a concerted, fairly > slick, and thoroughly disgusting effort to present Itanic as an > upgrade rather than a regrettable alternative - and the majority of > the VMS population seemed quite willing to go along with that view > until a small subset of us screamed bloody murder for several years > running setting the record straight. electronics & technology seemed to drop through threshold for the mid-range market and demand exploded. Old post of decade of vax sliced & diced by year, model, US/non-US. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction 43xx saw similar numbers in that market in same time-frame ... except it appeared to edge out vax numbers with having some large corporate customers with orders of multiple hundreds at a time (sort of explosion with local, distributed departmental servers) by mid-80s, that market was starting to shift to workstations and large PCs. the later 43xx machines, which had expected to repeat the explosive sales numbers of the earlier machines ... almost dried up (similar to what was seen with vax). some old 43xx related email from the period http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx this old post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#15 departmental servers has reference to customer, that spring '79 was looking at 20 4341 order http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#email790404b .... but by fall 79, order had turned into 210 4341s there was big explosion internally ... departmental 43xx machines taking over deparmental supply rooms and in some cases, conference rooms. it was also significant contributor to internal network passing 1000 nodes in 1983 (same time frame arpanet/internet great conversion to tcp/ip; .... internal network was larger than arpanet/internet from just about beginning until possibly late '85 or early '86) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970
From: Mayan Moudgill on 23 Oct 2009 10:17
nmm1(a)cam.ac.uk wrote: > > No way. Sorry. HP had restarted the PA-RISC line by then, IBM had > restarted POWER, MIPS was available for purchase (and there were > many companies with the resources to take it over and restart it), > SPARC was still very much alive, and doubtless there were other plots > and plans. Don't know about the other companies, but IBM had never ceased POWER development; it just seemed that way to the outside world :) And SGI was catastrophically late. I don't know what the state of their processor development team was at that point; did they even have anyone left? |