> Bob Colwell mentions originally doing out of order design at Multiflow.
Actually no, it was Metaflow [0] who was doing out-of-order. To quote Colwell:
"I think he lacked faith that the three of us could pull this off. So he contacted a group called Metaflow. Not to be confused with Multiflow, no
connection."
"Metaflow was a San Diego group startup. They were trying to design an out of order microarchitecture for chips. Fred thought what the heck, we can just license theirs and remove lot of risk from our
project. But we looked at them, we talked to their guys, we used their simulator for a while, but eventually we became convinced that there were some fundamental design decisions that Metaflow had made that we thought would ultimately limit what we could do with Intel silicon."
Multiflow, [1] where Colwell worked, has nothing to do with OoO, its design is actually way closer to Itanium. So close, in-fact that the Itanium project is arguably a direct decedent of Multiflow (HP licensed the technology, and hired Multiflow's founder, Josh Fisher). Colwell claims that Itainum's compiler is nothing more than the Multiflow compiler with large chunks rewritten for better performance.
Actually no, it was Metaflow [0] who was doing out-of-order. To quote Colwell:
"I think he lacked faith that the three of us could pull this off. So he contacted a group called Metaflow. Not to be confused with Multiflow, no connection."
"Metaflow was a San Diego group startup. They were trying to design an out of order microarchitecture for chips. Fred thought what the heck, we can just license theirs and remove lot of risk from our project. But we looked at them, we talked to their guys, we used their simulator for a while, but eventually we became convinced that there were some fundamental design decisions that Metaflow had made that we thought would ultimately limit what we could do with Intel silicon."
Multiflow, [1] where Colwell worked, has nothing to do with OoO, its design is actually way closer to Itanium. So close, in-fact that the Itanium project is arguably a direct decedent of Multiflow (HP licensed the technology, and hired Multiflow's founder, Josh Fisher). Colwell claims that Itainum's compiler is nothing more than the Multiflow compiler with large chunks rewritten for better performance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaflow_Technologies
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiflow