主题：【原创】龙芯的前景----嵌入式领域与桌面领域 -- 隆飞

I don't agree with you that compatibility is the reason why Itanium is not successful in the PC market. Even if applications can be recompiled for Itanium processors, the performance will not be better than out-of-order architectures especially for general-purpose integer applications, such SPEC INT benchmarks. The reason is that the main performance bottlenecks are irregular memory accesses (or L2 cache misses) and hard-to-predict branches. At this time, the EPIC/VLIW compiler techniques (prefetching and predication) are very effectitve for regular code such as SPEC FP but rather limited for irregular code like SPEC INT. Professor Wen-mei Hwu's IMPACT group did a detailed study "Field-testing IMPACT EPIC Research Results in Itanium 2" on this.