Replies to post #4930 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Haddock, Re: the only software that would be preferentially available for IA64 would be that that matches the buyer profile of IA64 hardware, in other words very high end, expensive software.

Without any help, this would almost assuredly be true.

[sgolds]

Haddock,

It seems clear that the difficult thing is porting to 64 bits, not porting to one specific architecture or another.

Not exactly. Actually, not even close: Optimizing for the high degree of parallelism in EPIC design is the most difficult part of Itanium porting. If you try to run Itanium code written as if it were a simple 64-bit port, much of the processor will be starved for execution and sit idle. You will have a very, very slow 800MHz processor.

Opteron, however, is designed to run x86 code fast after a simple port to 64-bit. There is more optimizing to be done for AMD64 to fully shine, but nothing compared to Itanium.