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0 pointssitkack11mo ago0 comments

Why was the sinking of SGI great?

0 comments

Oh, that wasn't the intent. I meant two separate things. The Itanic itself was kind of fascinating, but mostly panned (hence the nickname).

SGI's decision to built out Itanium systems may have helped precipitate their own downfall. That was sad.

cogman1011mo ago

Still makes me sad. I partially think a major reason for the demise was that it was simply constructed too soon. Compiler tech wasn't nearly good enough to handle the ISA.

Nowadays because of the efforts that have gone in to making SIMD effective, I'd think modern compilers would have an easier time taking advantage of that unique and strange uarch.

sitkackOP11mo ago

VLIW has a fatal flaw in how it was used in these systems. You cannot run general purpose dynamically scheduled workloads unless you combine the JIT engine and the scheduler. PRIOR ART. Which is the same exact problem of trying to run multiple compute kernels on a GPU at the same time. VLIW with an OS and runtime that uses a higher level language, Wasm or the JVM, could forseably support dynamic workloads where the main cpu was VLIW.

Now if they had been designed as GPU like devices for processing data, then Fortune 1000 would have never needed or used Hadoop.

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