HP & Compaq

From: Carlos Murillo <cmurillo_at_emtelsa.multi.net.co>
Date: Fri Sep 7 07:38:15 2001

At 10:59 AM 9/7/01 +0100, Hans wrote:
>> They most certainly did not! Itanium is the marketing name for what was
>> called Merced for many years. It's been in development since something
>> like the early 90's.

>HP on the other hand is heavily involved in Merced/Itanium development
>and plan on using that architectire as a replacemnet for their PA/RISC.
>
> -- HBP

Again, Itanium is more or less what HP already had in sight as a
replacement/successor to PA-RISC even before it was called
Mercer/IA64/Itanium. HP had intended the architecture to
feature many parallel resources (which IA64 will have), multi-instruction
set with dynamic switching (which IA64 will have) and
a sophisticated instruction scheduler that would have optimized
the utilization of the chip resources to achieve maximum parallelism,
instead of relying on the compiler to do the optimal scheduling.
HP holds patents on all of these features. When the alliance with
Intel came up, they dropped the last feature from the design
and went back to the schedule-optimizing compiler paradigm. I am sure
that Intel then pressed to include features that they deemed
"convenient". In any event, Itanium is more a brainchild of HP
than of Intel.

carlos.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo_at_nospammers.ieee.org
Received on Fri Sep 07 2001 - 07:38:15 BST