> Now, attempts to do radically different things (like Itanium) failed for various reasons, in Itanium's case at least partially because it was hard to write compilers good enough to exploit its VLIW design. It's up in the air whether a different high-level language would have made those compilers feasible.
My day job involves supporting systems on Itanium: the Intel C compiler on Itanium is actually pretty good... now. We'd all have a different opinion of Itanium if it had been released with something half as good as what we've got now.
I'm sure you can have a compiler for any language that really makes VLIW shine. But it would take a lot of work, and you'd have to do that work early. Really early. Honestly, if any chip maker decided to do a clean-sheet VLIW processor and did compiler work side-by-side while they were designing it, I'd bet it would perform really well.
Thank you for an interesting comment - seems to imply that Intel have markedly improved the Itanium compiler since they discontinued Itanium which is interesting!
I guess any new architecture needs to be substantially better than existing out of order, superscalar implementations to justify any change and we are still seeing more transistors being thrown at existing architectures each year and generating some performance gains.
I wonder if / when this stops then we will see a revisiting of the VLIW approach.
I doubt it. Another major disadvantage of VLIW is instruction density. If compiler cannot fill all instruction slots, you are losing the density (thus wasting cache, bandwidth, etc).
> Poulson is fundamentally different and much more akin to traditional RISC or CISC microprocessors. Instructions, rather than explicitly parallel bundles, are dynamically scheduled and executed. Dependencies are resolved by flushing bad results and replaying instructions; no more global stalls. There is even a minimal degree of out-of-order execution – a profound repudiation of some of the underlying assumptions behind Itanium.
Given the large amount of security problems OoO has caused, there is a chance that we may revisit the experiment in the future with a less rigid attitude and greater success.
My day job involves supporting systems on Itanium: the Intel C compiler on Itanium is actually pretty good... now. We'd all have a different opinion of Itanium if it had been released with something half as good as what we've got now.
I'm sure you can have a compiler for any language that really makes VLIW shine. But it would take a lot of work, and you'd have to do that work early. Really early. Honestly, if any chip maker decided to do a clean-sheet VLIW processor and did compiler work side-by-side while they were designing it, I'd bet it would perform really well.