Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[sgolds]

wbmw, actually, it depends on how efficient you want your EPIC code. A simple port in the way you described can be done, but it does not take advantage of EPIC optimizations based on the order of instructions. Without hand coding of critical paths you get a reliable but inefficient code with parts of the CPU stalling because instruction queues get underruns.

Originally, Intel expressed that compilers would be able to take care of this. However, Intel never did quite understand the subtleties of software developement. It was widely reported by Itanium developers that they were disappointed with the efficiency of Itanium compilers. I have not read anything in connection with Itanium2 to see that the compilers have improved noticably.

EPIC simply must have code properly optimized or the whole theory of it falls apart.