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by wahern 1619 days ago
> Intel and HP had hundreds of smart people trying to solve the "software problem" of Itanium and they did not succeed.

I've also heard a contrary story that Intel and HP simply assumed the compilers would show up, or at least failed to put in sufficient effort to advance the industry. I'm curious if you have any sources. I've always wondered what the true story was, though neither need be mutually exclusive.

It would seem foolhardy for Intel and HP not to heavily invest in compiler research given the stakes. OTOH, the norm seems to be for hardware vendors to suck at deliberately building and evolving software ecosystems around their hardware, especially as commodity hardware and open source software became ubiquitous. And "sufficient effort" is definitely a matter of opinion.

By way of example, early examples of polyhedral compilation go back to the 1990s, but it wasn't until the 2010s that implementations shipped in GCC and clang, long after Itanium failed. I doubt it would have saved Itanium, but I would have expected to see such contributions earlier and coming directly from Intel and HP. But maybe my expectations are too high.
1 comments
aidenn0 1619 days ago
The Intel C compiler was already well established as a top IA-32 compiler by the late 90s (prior to any IA-64 release). This article[1] from 1999 assumes Intel is responsible for the compiler. My recollection is that the primary focus on 3rd party software was getting systems software ported.

I don't think Intel was banking on 3rd parties making compilers. A lot of 32-bit architectures not named "68000" from the 80s/early 90s suffered from poor first-party compilers and a lack of good 3rd party compiler support; in 1980 an optimizing compiler was not considered an important part of a microprocesor's ecosystem, but by the time IA-64 came around the importance was fairly well understood by hardware vendors. Given the quality of the first-party IA-32 compilers, I think Intel (and everyone else) expected that the first-party IA-64 compilers would be good.

Certainly by the release of Merced (and likely well before), compiler engineers internal to Intel were aware of how hard it was to codegen for IA-64. Certainly during the time period that Intel was pushing IA-64, they had an insatiable desire for compiler developers with advanced degrees.

1: https://www.cnet.com/news/intels-merced-chip-may-slip-furthe...

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