EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing)
EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing)
Posted Nov 16, 2023 18:40 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)In reply to: EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing) by anton
Parent article: The push to save Itanium
I disagree, in large part because the benefits of EPIC were being touted by comparison of hand-crafted EPIC examples versus compiler output; in other words, Intel could reasonably (by 1995) have had an EPIC compiler, and be showing that it was a long way short of the needed quality to meet hand-crafted examples. I'd also note that the techniques that would be needed to make EPIC compilers meet the hand-crafted examples go well beyond today's state of the art.
And underlying this is the degree to which EPIC was focused on impractical "if only software would do better" situations, not on the real world.
EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing)
Posted Nov 21, 2023 20:25 UTC (Tue)
by JohnDallman (guest, #168141)
[Link]
Posted Nov 21, 2023 20:25 UTC (Tue) by JohnDallman (guest, #168141) [Link]
They never had a real plan for how to make compilers discover the parallelization opportunities that they wanted to exist in single-threaded code. The intention was to have a horde of developers, and discover lots of heuristics that would add up to that. Essentially, a fantasy, but it meant the compiler team got to add more people and its managers got career progression. This had started early in the project, when the compiler people claimed "we can handle that" for many of the difficulties in hardware design.