Glenn writes:
> 2. slide 14, "IA-64 Floating Point Architecture"
>
>         highlights the "Freddie Mac" (my term) instruction:
>         FMAC = Floating-point Multiply/ACcumulate = a * b + c

Of which there are allegedly four in Merced, giving it 6 gigaflop FP
performance.

>         The odd thing here (to me) is that floating point numbers
>         are 82 bits.

The hardware supports 80 bit extended precision floating point.  This is
perhaps the most commonly used data size for numerical scientific
calculations these days I guess.  64 bits isn't enough, but 128 bits
is too expensive :-)  I haven't seen the 82 number yet, though in memory
they are definitely only 80.

> 3. slide 16, "IA-64 Compatibility with PA-RISC Through Dynamic Translation"
>
>         (IA-32 compatibility is through hardware, mentioned on slide 6.)

And the hooks are there to eventually remove it.

>         explicitly states "Bundled with HP-UX"; no mention of MPE.
>         <sigh> The fight goes on....

Well, I don't think CSY has decided how they are going to do things for
sure yet, though the dynamic translation seems like the most likely
scenario for most of MPE at least initially.

>         Under the "Performance" bullet, it notes
>         "1:1 mapping of PA-RISC to IA-64"

Haven't read through the instruction set yet, and the released documentation
does *not* cover the supervisor-mode features of the architecture.  For
example there is *no* discussion of Virtual Memory!  I've always suspected
though that it is going to look a heck of a lot like PA-RISC 2.0, since
that would almost be required to do the dynamic translation stuff.

Maybe there's another document I haven't found yet though.

>         "Open source software enabling" is shown to coincide with
>         the "IA-64 Architecture Public Release", which was today.

What's been released today (at least what I've seen so far) is seriously
deficient if you're trying to write an operating system, though it may be
all you need if you're only going to be writing application programs.

G.