GCC, Opteron and IA64 (was [RFC] Merge criteria for tree-ssa)

[Laurent GUERBY <laurent at guerby dot net>]

On Sun, 2004-02-08 at 11:50, Robert Dewar wrote:
> The ia64 still has plenty of steam left in terms of existing interest.
> Note for example that ia64 is the natural follow on for SGI customers,
> and HP customers in general are still quite focused on the ia64.
> Whether that materializes into major sales remains to be seen. But
> SGI for example is certainly betting the store on ia64, and at least
> the market seems to be reasonably happy with this (SGI stock has risen
> four fold in the last few months).

http://www.detnews.com/2003/technology/0312/03/technology-340306.htm
<<...
Computer makers shipped 10,746 servers with Opteron, the chip from
Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro, Intel's biggest rival in
processors, IDC analyst Mark Melenovsky said. Intel's Itanium powered
4,957 servers, which run networks and Web sites. 

Opteron has won clients such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and International
Business Machines Corp., giving Intel's processors for servers their
biggest competition ever just as businesses start to increase spending,
analysts said. Revenue at Advanced Micro is forecast to grow more than
twice as fast as Intel's this year and next, helped by Opteron sales,
according to analysts. 
...>>

At work where we buy a few hundred processors per year, IBM fired first,
they shipped us an e325 bi opteron 246 (2GHz) this week, in 32 bit mode
it has roughly the same performance on our software as a Xeon 3.06 GHz
and is less expensive (and Itanium is even more expensive than Xeon).
Sun also promised us their Opteron machine, we'll see.

If anyone knows where to download GCC binaries packaged with Ada
(good enough to compile current GCC) we're takers? I believe we'll get
RHEL AS and SuSE 8 server to play with, may be it's already there.

> It's interesting that we (AdaCore) have had FAR more interest in an ia64
> GNAT port than an Opteron port so far. We have a substantial
> contract with HP to implement GNAT on ia64/OpenVMS, and we may
> well be announcing one or more ia64/GNU/Linux contracts in the
> near future. So far there is much less interest in the Opteron
> for Ada, but of course that may change.

That may be tool vendor perception skew, IA64 need far more
investment on this side of the market than Opteron just
to be acceptable (new architecture), but that does not translate 
directly into hardware buyer demand.

Laurent