What are the disadvantages of offering customers a new architecture?
A2:
Think about the Intel IA-32 architecture, for example.
A3:
Over time, what features have moved from outside the chip to inside? Cache and floating-point instructions are two examples. What others can you cite?
A4:
You might try to research the relative latency of integer multiplication in other architectures.
A6:
Two M-units can load data (load pair and a regular load) and another M-unit can store a result with templates such as MMF and Mxx for the instruction group. The original Itanium processor has fewer M-units.