Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

but if you have a program, which you want to compile and run, you just take gcc, compile it as "gcc -O2 -c bigproj.cc -o bigproj.o" and... get pretty poor results

I have to agree with you here. Quickly compiled code seems to run faster on x86 than on IPF. This puts IPF at a disadvantage. Not too many people these days are hand optimizing code. The hardware is changing too fast to bother.