I am really rooting for these folks, after going to a talk on it last year about this time and trying to everything thing I could to pick it apart (they had good answers for all my questions) I felt confident that its going to be a pretty awesome architecture. Assuming that reducing to practice all of their great ideas doesn't reveal some amazing 'gotcha', I'm hoping to get an eval system.
The thing I'm most closely watching are the compiler stuff since this was such a huge issue on Itanium (literally 6x difference in code execution speed just from compiler changes) and putting some structured data (pointer chasing) type applications through their paces which is always a good way to flush out memory/cpu bottlenecks.
Not quite: only scheduling and binary creation is done at install time. Instruction selection and optimization is done during compilation in the usual way.
The thing I'm most closely watching are the compiler stuff since this was such a huge issue on Itanium (literally 6x difference in code execution speed just from compiler changes) and putting some structured data (pointer chasing) type applications through their paces which is always a good way to flush out memory/cpu bottlenecks.