Welcome to my kill file. Read what I said
> reverse engineering. You have to start from _explicitly_ publicly
> available information and work in absolute clean-room conditions. Intel
Please go and read a book on trade secret law while you are at it
> usually helps) into killing the Alpha architecture and selling Intel
> their semiconductor operations (for below cost) to get out of this legal
> tangle. Do you need more proof?
Bollocks - you dont even understand all the issues involved
> Dell and Compaq are releasing NT machines based on SMP _and_ clustering
> to reach into the kind of parallel performance available from Linux.
Not really. You cant buy the software for the cost of the Linux setup
including hardware.
> And Intel has just bought a company that had developed special hardware
> for 8-CPU SMP boxes. You are certainly aware of that as you are the
> major developer for Linux SMP, apart from Linux himself.
Lots of folks have been doing this - but SMP doesnt scale - thats why SGI
have their Onyx stuff
> Alpha Linux port, and now this architecture is dead. The other
> architectures have a restricted user base and incomplete
> implementations. Perhaps the Linux Community should start thinking in
> strategic terms about CPU choice?
Merced is irrelevant to any issues until its publically available, unless you
want to go and do a lot of deep digging into HP's patents and other clues
on the thing, steal a chip and write the code.
You can certainly plan ahead by reading up on VLIW and writing a gcc scheduler
for a theoretical VLIW box and testing it.. Why not - go ahead do something
you think will be useful.
Alan