On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 01:04:57PM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
> On Thu Jul 26 11:18:04 EDT 2012, mirtchovski@gmail.com wrote:
> > >  I liked it for the same reason I
> > > liked those Cell processors - I'm weird.
> >
> > a lot of people really hated it because it killed alpha...
>
> credit where due.  itanic killed alpha.
>
> or more accurately, the politics behind itanic.

And perhaps the conception too? about what was needed from the
compiler and the programmer to really use the stuff. It seemed far
too complex to be of sufficiently easy of use and large benefits to
convince a lot of people to try. The doubtful description read in
Hennesy and Patterson' "Computer Architecture" was fair enough.

Not to speak about compatibility, the one feature that made Intel and
Microsoft prosper...

The Plan9 vs Unix is not in the very same pattern. If Itanium was
doomed, the Plan9 approach seems to me more and more valid
everyday---interconnections, ubiquity or lack of locality of
resources; terminals vs. CPU vs. fileservers etc.

And simplicity...

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        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
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