On Jan 8, 9:02 am, quans...@quanstro.net (erik quanstrom) wrote: > On Thu Jan 8 05:11:37 EST 2009, nadiasver...@gmail.com wrote: > > > > Here's my standard true Itanic story. I know a guy who wrote the sin() > > > intrinsic. His comment: "I do not intend to write cos()". > > > I am working on a python ctypes FFI trampoline for IA-64 Windows. I > > find the processor architecture lovely. I am sorry your friend was > > turned off by it, but it has a number of excellent features. I wish I > > could do more IA-64 development. > > would you care to share why you think this chip > is good?
The instruction set is quite lovely. Many architectures get register windows wrong, but the Itanium has a variable-length register fill/ spill engine that gets invoked automatically. Of course, you can program the engine too. I also REALLY like predicated instructions. That is, you perform an operation and then predicate the instructions that should execute if it comes out the way you want. It really simplifies assembly-level if/then and switch-style blocks. The hardware also has built-in support for closures. Every function executed is implicitly paired with a given local memory region. There is a *lot* to like about Itanium. w/r to the world passing the IA64 by, sadly you can only get decent IA64 systems from HP. I haven't been able to find decent boards or processors available elsewhere.
