A letter from an architect who thought IA-64 marchitecture does not cut it was described by another, Australian architect, as "total crap" today. The Aussie architect, who does not wish to be named on the grounds that he wants to work in the future, was responding to a letter which claimed Merced would run "hotter, harder and slower" from a British architect. But the Aussie architect said: "This is a load of crap. As both a chip designer and a member of SPEC (www.spec.org) I think I'm qualified to say that IA-64 allows processors to run cooler, and faster, than more traditional RISC (or CISC or VLIW or whathaveyou) architectures." Our mate, down under, has pointed us to the following sites for validation of his Great Architect of the Universe argument. He suggested readers take a peek here, and said this enormous PDF file is worth a look too, given you have the bandwidth. The Aussie continued: "Harder, to design, yes, but here's guessing Intel can and will pull it off. UIUC's IMPACT group have done all the research over the past 10 years to show, quite plainly, that this is true. The usual figure of merit bandied about is "around 80 per cent". "Now, Merced might be shoddy, heck, every single IA-64 Intel product might be quite terrible. I doubt this will happen, but if it does (I give this 15 per cent or so odds) it won't be because of the architecture that the chips fail. "IA-64 is the best thing to happen to computing since the microprocessor. I mean it. IA-64 cuts through Microsoft bloat like nothing else. It guns through floating point grunt code like a T3D. Here's hoping it takes off! "And please keep me anonymous for this one :)" We await readers' comments with interests. First thing tomorrow, we shall attempt to collate every IA-64 story together and also refer you back to our Intel sources which said Coppermine is better than the whole lot put together. We shall also look at the arguments for and against our Russian stringer Andy Fatkullin's story... Actually, I thought Taipei was bad but IA-64 land is worse... ®