Richard Cownie (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on February 5, 2013 4:33 am wrote:
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on February 5, 2013 2:51 am wrote:
> > Richard Cownie (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on February 4, 2013 5:52 pm wrote:
> > >
> > > Conversely, porting to Itanium (which was narrowly avoided ...) would have meant
> > > spending money on a relatively expensive workstation, not useful for anything else,
> > >
> >
> > The key word is "relatively".
> > According to my understanding, by now you can find decent Itanium gear (HP rx2620, or even
> > rx2660, if you got lucky) on eBay for less than the price of new developer-grade PC.
>
> The SPARC64 port was around 1999/2000, x86_64 as soon as it became available in 2003.
> It was lucky for me that Intel adopted x86_64, since they were also a customer
> for the product and wanted to run it on some Intel platform, not SPARC or Opteron.
>
> > > and then having to port all the performance-sensitive executables, even those which
> > > didn't need >4GB, to have anything shippable.
> > >
> >
> > After you ported to Linux/x64, shouldn't porting to Linux/IPF be close
> > to "just recompile"? Esp, if the same code already runs on SPARC?
>
> In theory, yes. Except that the result of "just recompile" would probably have
> been something very slow, since the code was mostly about traversing many GB's
> of complex data structures in thoroughly unpredictable ways, which an in-order
> static-scheduled cpu would have struggled with.

LOL, as opposed to the OOOE SPARC you were using?