Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

I suspect this is an understatement. Hasn't Intel taken a lower road by using an architecture that
is easier to design in silicon, but more difficult for the software folks?

Or, maybe that is the higher road. And, Intel is right and everyone else is wrong?

That remains to be determined. EPIC is neither the second coming of RISC nor the disaster
proponents and opponents make it out to be.

I suspect in the end IPF will prove better than some RISC ISAs and worse than other RISC ISA
on a technology/implementation normalized basis. But with CPU transistor counts exceeding
10 million and the CPU/memory imbalance growing, the effect of architectural choice has a
weak influence on performance and cost compared to 1) process technology, and to a lessor
extent 2) implementation quality. The only major exception to that is x86 is really brain dead for
floating point and needs a lot a work in implementation and software to make up for it compared
to RISC and EPIC.


What does IPF stand for?

Itanium processor family. Intel reportedly changed the name from IA-64 to reduce the emphasis
of 64 bitness being a primary feature.