Replies to post #7675 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[greg s]

wbmw,

re: To think otherwise is a 'Droid fantasy.

Ya know, we need to cut the AMD fans some slack. After all, AMD has never tried to introduce a new general purpose architecture. They did have the 29K in the embedded space, but it was eventually killed due to competition and AMD's need to shift scarce resources to their X86 effort. These guys just don't have the background to understand what it takes or how it goes.

[Haddock]

No one is going to pull the plug until that data is available. To think otherwise is a 'Droid fantasy.

Pulling the plug on Itanium is and AMD fan's nightmare, not fantasy. That would mean Intel competing with AMD in the x86-64 space.

[Dan3]

They pushed the i860 for a lot longer than most people remember.

This document discusses the three leading i860 compilers, offered by
• Portland Group, ver 2.1 38% improvement
• MicroWay NDP, ver 4.1d 32% improvement
• MetaWare, ver 2.4 35% improvement
http://www.dalsoft.esmartweb.com/i860.htm

Here's another comment:
We have been selling compilers for the i860 for 3 years now, both C and
Fortran. Relevant numbers:
Matrix multiply: 27 Mflops
Linpack (DP) 100x100: 9.4 Mflops
Linpack (DP) 300x300: 11.5 Mflops


http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/92-10-003

For several years, the i860 was generally expected to replace the X86 family in Intel systems aimed at high end applications.

Here's another reference to the glory days of Intel's last attempt to get away from the X86 architecture:
Tasks for accelerator can be compiled with the use of various compilers and libraries. We checked proper operation of tasks compiled with:

Portland Group (Intel corp.) C compiler v2.1
Portland Group (Intel corp.) FORTRAN compiler v2.1
MetaWare High C(TM) Compiler Release 2.1f
Green Hills FORTRAN-I860(TM) Compiler Release 1.8.5 (1.2a)
Pacific-Sierra Research VAST(R)-2 Vectorizer V2.25.3
GNU i860 C compiler
Special graphics library was developed.

Technical specifications.
Processor:

40 MHz RISC Intel i80860XR;
80 Mflops with matrix operations;
67 Mflops with FFT;
11.8 double precision 100x100 Linpack Mflops;
300 000 short vector per second (24 bit per pixel).
http://www.mics.msu.su/cvteng.html

Microway was biggest seller of i860 systems - its Quadputer with 4 i860s was quite good at the same sorts of vector processing that Itanium's good at. In some ways, Itanium is like 3 i860s in one core.