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by jdsully 1619 days ago
>A mainstream VLIW could've had it's place, and it's trivial to find parallelism in FFTs, SVDs, matrix multiplies, and so on.

There are already DSPs for this purpose, but typical server workloads don't generally use those algorithms. Perhaps Itanium would have made a good DSP but it wasn't really aimed at that market.
1 comments
xscott 1619 days ago
> There are already DSPs for this purpose

I should've been more clear: Most open source projects, or my projects for the customers I used to have, can't/couldn't rely on a DSP chip or card being installed. If Itanium had gone mainstream, I could've counted on it's VLIW instructions.

We can /almost/ count on a GPU nowadays, but programming in Cuda ties you to NVidia, and OpenCL doesn't seem to have taken off the same way.

> Perhaps Itanium would have made a good DSP but it wasn't really aimed at that market

I suspect there are a lot of FFTs, SVDs, and large matrix multiplies in software now. Deep learning, convolutional nets, image and audio algorithms, TikTok "filters", and so on. Of course there was almost none of that on desktops in the late 90s.

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aidenn0 1618 days ago
> I should've been more clear: Most open source projects, or my projects for the customers I used to have, can't/couldn't rely on a DSP chip or card being installed. If Itanium had gone mainstream, I could've counted on it's VLIW instructions.

So to sum up: you can't convince customers to buy special hardware and neither could HP/Intel?

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xscott 1616 days ago
> So to sum up: <snarky shit reply>

I wish it was possible to have a discussion that wasn't about who could get the best zinger in to burn the other person. This isn't Reddit, and you aren't in high school.

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aidenn0 1611 days ago
I agree my response was snarky, I disagree it was shit. I wasn't looking for a "sick burn" sort of reaction.

Here's a slightly longer and more boring version of what I posted:

Itanium came out at the tail-end of a long movement from special-purpose to commodity hardware; servers and workstations were moving from 68k/MIPS/Sparc to PC-based hardware. It was a DSP that ran general-purpose loads "okay" when most people were looking for a general-purpose CPU that ran DSP type loads "okay" (i.e. the various SIMD extensions to x86 and POWER).

Anything that starts with "If Itanium had gone mainstream" is a counterfactual. Maybe it would have delayed GPGPU as the performance advantage of programmable shaders over running on CPU would have been smaller and maybe without AMD's competition, it would have allowed Intel to keep bus-speeds lower for longer.

My original point that Itanium was a failure to deliver the hardware people wanted rather than the failure of software to appear on said hardware stands.

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