Jason R Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com> writes:

> On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 08:45:18AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> 
>  > the question is: is itanium processor overadvertised and is it jsut piece
>  > of crap, or linux for IA64 is piece of crap?
> 
> More like: Itanium (I) was slow junk (Itanium II is supposed to address
> many of the performance problems).  But IA64 requires a lot of help from
> the compiler to achieve any performance at all, and GCC is simply not up
> to the task yet.  Therefore, any code compiled by GCC for IA64 is going
> to be quite slow.

It's worse than that. GCC is not up to the task, but even Intel and
HP's commercial compilers for IA64, while better, do not deliver the
theoretical performance of the system. The IA64 project had a lot of
"oh, ten years of compiler research will tell us how to make this
work", and it hasn't really panned out that way.

        - Nath