[xoranth]

> * the whole idea hinges on the compiler being able to figure out the correct instruction schedule ahead of time. While feasible for Intel's/HP's in house compiler team, the authors of other toolchains largely did not bother, instead opting for more conventional code generation that did not performed all too well.

Was Intel's compiler actually able to get good performance on Itanium? How much less screwed would Itanium have been if other toolchains matched the performance on Intel's compiler?

Also, I vaguely remember reading that Itanium also had a different page table structure (like a hash table?). Did that cause problems too?

[BirAdam]

Intel’s compiler was a bit better than some but still wasn’t great. Largely, Intel quickly lost interest in Itanium when AMD64 started selling well. HP had their own tooling, and HP was pretty much the only customer buying Itaniums. Intel quit investing in Itanium beyond what their contractual obligations to HP dictated.

I am curious about what could have been, but my assumption is that a mature and optimized software industry would be required. This was never going to happen after the launch of AMD64.

[martinpw]

It's a long time ago but the thing I remember the most is that the binaries were huge, around 3x the size of x86 binaries. At the time we were very space constrained and that aspect alone was big concern. If the performance had been there it might still have been worth pursuing, but the performance never exceeded the fastest x86 processors at the time.