[sdiy] Another new hard to find part....

[Rainer Buchty]

> Meanwhile all the successful 64-bit processors run 32-bit code with
> ease.  Itanium's VLIW approach hasn't taken off, and shows no signs of
> making any headway at all in the mainstream PC market. What this means
> in practice is that I think we're guaranteed at least another decade of
> x86 compatibility.

On a side note, the Intel Itanium even offers IA32 compatibility. Not very
performant, though, which is why they finally licensed AMD's x86-64
technology.

You don't think that Intel would give up IA32 compatibility... Neither
would Microsoft ever abandon the Win32 API.

And since nobody really programs in assembly language anymore (at least
not on PCs), it doesn't matter what the instruction set looks like. The
compiler will take care of it.

As long as you don't go for parallelizing compilers which is IMO the main
reason for poor Itanium performance.

> In any case, I think it's more likely that products will be continually
> updated and consolidated, so if the underlying hardware or OS changes,
> updates will become available.

Assuming that the respective company is still in business or didn't
undergo some major restructuration. Logic/PC anyone?

> Where products have disappeared - like the original Digidesign Softsynth
> - they've always been replaced by a wider selection of alternatives,
> often of better quality.

If we now replace "Digidesign Softsynth" with "analog synthesizers" ...
There are people who like certain software as they like certain machines.
They don't want to change and are happy with what they have.

No matter what (and even better) alternatives are out.

Just look at the die-hard C64 fans who would rather sink an enormous
amount of money into 20MHz accelerators, 16MB expansion units, SCSI
interfaces and the likes. (Have a look at comp.sys.cbm...)

Not to mention the analog-vs-DSP discussions popping up here from time to
time.

> Meanwhile if there were a DIY open source softsynth - something like
> Csound but with a more intelligent internal design and better interface
> - a project like that would run and run. Csound is already 25+ years
> old.

There *are* DIY open source soft synths, even plenty of them. See
the Software Synthesis section of http://linux-sound.org for instance.

Rainer