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Hardware

1GHz Alphas 117

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ain't-that-cool dept.
RelliK writes "news.com has a story about 1GHz Alphas demonstrated at PC Expo. They'll be available by mid-2000. In the mean time, they'll start shipping 750 MHz Alphas 21264 in July. " MMMmmm... alphariffic.
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1GHz Alphas More

1GHz Alphas

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  • Its about time Alpha realized that to be #1 you have to play the "mhz game".


    Alpha has been making extremely fast chips for years. Look up their old roadmaps and check the clock speeds.


    Not that clock speed means a whole lot. However, Alpha's spec numbers have been impressive too.

  • ps: they were running the control workstation in GNOME.

    As ROOT.

    Have fun.
  • That would be totally different then :-)

    On the subject of Alphas in retail outlets, it would be darned nice if the availablity of Slot B boards made this feasible. I've met some people who work for retail chains who would like to offer Alphas but don't know how to go about it and are somewhat frightened by the cost of motherboards.
  • Dude, drop the pipe! The most stable version
    of NT is the one that runs on Alpha. The Alpha Win32 compiler is light years ahead of the x86.

    Is running an x86 app via FX!32 gonna cost you some speed? Sure, but you can afford it when your 400MHz 21164 is significantly faster than a PII 450.

    Finally, I would imagine that the 64 bit version is unstable, as only Dave Cutler's team is running it. (That means it's still in development :)

  • Saw it :) (Score:2)

    by tgd ( 2822 )
    Saw it today... Nice little booth that Alpha Processor had there.

    More interesting IMHO was the dual 750mhz system they had running Linux. 8mb L2 cache ram on those suckers. They didn't seem to have any example of how fast it was, but it was impressive. I'm not sure why they were demoing the 1gig Alpha but didn't go all out and show a dual 1ghz system. Maybe a motherboard issue? Anyone know for sure?

    More impressive was some of the serious hardware that Compaq was showing, but the people they had there seemed clueless about which worked with Linux and which didn't.

    I was really disappointed at the Linux Pavilion though, seemed like half-baked attempts at doing something both by RedHat and Caldera. Liked what I saw at Cygnus's booth though. Liked that the BRU folks were actually giving away knickknacks, unlike practically everyone else there.

    Anyone going to PC Expo -- take a gander at the 64" HDTV at the Panasonic booth. Hmmmm... I want one. :)

  • Nothing like going to a client site to 'fix' their poor performance only to find them the running 3D pipes on their server.

    Volia! 100% CPU utilization. Moving the mouse really fast (last time I tried) also would put the CPU to 100% effectively locking everyone out.

  • Compaq was demoing a (I believe) 8 system dual-processor Beowulf cluster. I didn't get a good look at it, as I was drooling over the Alpha mainframes. :)

    I think I spotted one or two other companies demonstrating Beowulf clusters, and I remember spotting POV running on what looked like Linux above a stack of a half-dozen machines in one of the booths (might've been Compaq's) which I assume was showing the clustering too.

    Corel... er... HCC... er... rebel.com had the Netwinder RM there, which was cool too... They're not doing a very good job differentiating themselves from Corel, sitting in the middle of Corel's booth. :)
  • Win2000 isn't 64 bit. 64bit Windows is on Microsoft's road map (msdn.microsoft.com - there's a whitepaper and development guide).

    Also, Windows 2000 is one of the least bloated OSs i've ever seen, that can do what it does.
  • And you have Linux on the brain...he can put anything he pleases on an Alpha. Who made you the spokes person for the Linux community. You don't speak for me. I don't hate anyone because of the operating system they use. However I didn't find your signature amusing "check out Canadians getting killed." What is that supposed to mean? Didn't have the time to download the plugin. You might think about re-phrasing it.

    proudly Canadian eh!
  • The PowerPC boards for the Amiga aren't very good. They are made by a small company that had to design its own memory controller for the 680x0 and PPC processors. On their low budget, they came up with something that has very poor performance and does not support any level 2 cache. A PowerPC-only system would probably be faster, even though it would have to emulate 680x0 code. There is now a working 680x0 emulator for PowerPC Amigas, but it doesn't have that much use yet as there are no PowerPC-only systems available.
  • Do not use an apostrophe to indicate the plural form.


    What a great warning! this should be on everything. Cars, hand tools, vegetables... you name it.
  • Probally nothing, Cray is owned by SGI and they use MIPS.
  • *yawn* really? And exactly when did you see this, and what were the testing specs? Was the G4 running OS 8, X or Linux? Was the PIII running 95, 98, Linux or NT? What service packs/releases/updates were on either machine?
    For that matter, how many times was whatever test run to get an average?

    Ranting random stats... the way of the insecure.

    -Markvs

  • This would be a very tough thing to implement - even with standard motherboard design, the chipset and logic for these chips has still got to be really different.


    It'd also be kind of pointless - probably cheaper to actually just have 2 boxes.

  • How about cray's use alpha chips, homey.

  • Hmmm, isn't this how an episode of STTNG went? Systems so complex they produce unexpected results? I think the enterpise ended up creating a new life form.

    And just think, that was from a system with touch screens (eww) and people that went "woosh" and pushed doors open for you. ;)

    Hmmm, but what life form would a OC'ed Alpha produce? The Enterprise produced a little ball of energy thing if I remember correctly...

  • Agreed. The common consumer will hopefully have more purchasing power for their buck when these companies finally colide in an undoubtably heated price-war. Mind you, this won happen for a few years, but I can already smell the smoke from here.

    The competition between AMD and Intel has been well honestly, less than intense. I'm hoping that by the time that Intel realizes that its the underdog in this battle some REAL price juggling will occur.

    Mmm smells like ....Bacon!

    From the Canadian outbacke ...signing off
    Blackfire

  • I expect that the K7 has a good chance at grabbing SMP server marketshare from intel. The EV6 bus use a crossbar switch design for full processor clock speed communication between multiple processors providing much better performance than intel's model which requires that the processors communicate through the much slower 100MHz memory bus.

  • "lowering both cost and price"

    it's an interesting story, but whoever wrote the article is an idiot.
  • I know someone who's running fluid dynamics simulations on two machines. One alpha (21164) and one dual PII.

    Both machines are about a year old. The price tags where somewhere around $70K for the alpha and $3K for the PII.

    When running two simulations on the PII and one on the alpha (one sim. per cpu), the PII is marginally slower than the alpha.

    Ok, this is just one case. And I haven't seen the code and don't know which compiler options where used. Still, let's assume the code could be tuned to run twice as fast on the alpha, it's still one hell of a price/performance difference !

    These results are far away from the SPECint/SPECfp numbers, but they are real world results achieved by real world users. I think that's what counts.

    My point is, that although the alphas are really nice machines, and a new fast alpha will be faster than a new fast intel based machine, Compaq will have to get those price tags right.

    I'd definitely get an alpha as my next box, if only I could afford it. A dual EV6, mmmmmmm... But there is no way in hell I can ever get that kind of money. I could buy a farm of PIIs for those money instead.

    Linus himself is now working on a quad intel machine, instead of the dual alpha he had earlier. He said something like; the alpha is nice, but the intel machine is simply faster.

    It would be great to see cheap alphas below 600 MHz, and really expensive ones above. That way us ordinary people could get our dirty hands on affordable alphas, and the companies that need the higher speeds can fund compaq by buying the high end ones. Much like intel is doing today.
  • "they have 1 GHz chips running"

    Hmmm, Intel and AMD have both showed off 1GHz systems, but if you look closly they are both existing chips (In AMD's case an almost final K7, err Athlon or whatever) with massive cooling systems. Alpha will have a 1GHz chip that dosen't require freon or liquid nitrogen or things like that. Running, yes. For sale soon for the general public without a refrigerator, no.

    -----
  • I think what you mean is that there is more to a microporessrors performance than it's clock speed...and yes clock speed is a significant detail to be considered.
  • Yes, but imagine 40 or so one word responses.

    --

  • Linux is 64-bit on 64-bit architectures such
    as the Alpha or the UltraSPARC.
  • > A final note, a problem you get with high-speed
    > processors is that they become nice little
    > microwave transmittors (at 700-800+ Mhz, I think
    > it was) and so you really need to reduce the
    > power (the PA-RISC 8500 consumes 85W @ 440Mhz)
    > and up the shielding when clocking at this rate,
    > because otherwise you'd get a REAL pizza
    > cooker/toaster in your computer...

    I wouldn't worry too much about the frequency emitted by these chips (at least not for health reasons). There are a lot of signals in that region, and we live in an ocean of EM waves that are real close to the frequency of a Microwave (for instance most radar and microwave wireless communications are not too far off).

    The real danger with a Microwave is not in the range of frequencies, but in a very specific frequency, which just happens to resonate with water molecules, causing vibration and heat (and yes, this is a little oversimplified). Deviate just a little from that frequency, and there is no effect on water molecules at all, and no known effect on people.

    High frequencies causing interference with other devices, however, are possible, so shielding is important.

  • I thought I read somewhere that Win2000 won't be a true 64 bit OS, just a 64 bit filesystem or something. Can anyone confirm this?

    --

  • dual system w/ k7 & 21264 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Do you think that it would be possible to run a dual k7/alpha system? this way the Alpha could be set as "master" cpu and use the k7 as an x86 co-processor??? It would beat emulating the x86 code and be a seriously sick system, hell, this would make sense even from a marketing standpoint. " We provide the fastest x86 chips in our system to help you migrate to our faster Alpha technology.." What do you think? or have I been smoking too much?
  • We have had an opportunity to benchmark HP's new N4000 server with 8 440 MHz PA-8500 CPUs in them. The results in a nutshell:
    The PA-8500 inside that server lives up to what its SPECfp promises. It is 1.5-2x faster than SGI Origin2000 with 250 MHz MIPS R10000. That's with computational chemistry / molecular modelling codes crunching real world data sets up to 4 way parallel.

    So, in contrast to what the above poster guessed, SPECfp does not seem to be skewed when compared to real world performance. I'd like to see how the machine scales up to 8way. Soon we'll know that too.
  • Anyone know any other suppliers in the UK at a similar (better?) price?

    http://www.alpha-processor.com/where-to-buy/vend or_systems.asp
  • My question is,

    Alpha has always lunged ahead of the Pack with its chips.

    But I wonder how this will affect the current Intel slowdown - i.e., they have 1 GHz chips running, but they're not releasing them, slowly ramping up to them.

    Is this a threat to the Xeon?
  • yay... more for me to drool over-- Not like I'll ever be able to afford this chip OR a Xeon any time before 2005 or so, when they become the equivelents of 486/33s in our minds...

  • ... by the end of the year? Does that sound like a threat to the Xeon?
  • Its about time Alpha realized that to be #1 you have to play the "mhz game". They are by far the fastest processor on the market especially w/ the 21264 chipset. Combined w/ FX32 the alpha is the fastest desktop/server computer on the planet.

    http://www.dolex.org
  • "...beowulf..."

    /* run away */
  • The last time I read the Guiness Book of World Records (in 1998), the Intel Pentium II processor was the fastest computer processor (and the Alpha was knocked off that title). I guess that Intel held the title for this year as well. Now, I want to see the Alpha come out with that title once again!

  • More interestingly... (Score:4)

    by Prothonotar ( 3324 ) on Tuesday June 22, 1999 @11:18AM (#1838244) Homepage
    It's finaly (more or less) been confirmed that the 21264 Alphas and the K7s will be interchangeable. Now all we need are mobo's with BIOSes that can support both chips. And no ads in them either please!
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.

  • We don't need no stinkin' wires... (Score:5)

    by dublin ( 31215 ) on Tuesday June 22, 1999 @01:05PM (#1838250) Homepage
    So it looks like the Alpha will be the first microwave CPU on the market. How long until we just toss the wires and propagate the signals down a waveguide? :-)

    This is an interesting innovation - at those speeds, you can cook your food with the radiated RF energy, the dissipated heat, or both. Finally, a computer that's *really* an appliance!

    I can see it now, the new CPSC/FCC/DOE microwave PC warning label:

    WARNING - Do not remove this tag under penalty of law!
    (This isn't a matress or pillow, we mean it.)

    DANGER! Microwave Microprocessor Unit! Do not ever, ever open the case of this computer!

    RF Radiation Hazard inside. Opening this computer will let cancer-causing microwave
    frequency photons jump out and eat their way through your retinas on their way
    to your brain, where they may impair your judgement in selecting an operating system.

    • You've been warned.
    • Factory sealed for your protection.
    • This computer contains no user-servicable parts.
    • Like you could get it apart anyway, since Compaq uses these goofy screws...
    • Do NOT warm strawberry Pop-Tarts [tamucc.edu] in the Zip disk drive slot.
    • Coffee cups on the CD-ROM drive "cup holder" [zdnet.com] may be heated, but drive
      must be closed when no coffee cup is present, or it's your retinas, baby.
    • Digital/Compaq is NOT responsible for funny little fractal patterns on your CD's. [hamjudo.com]
    • Discontinue use if rash, irritation, redness, or swelling develops.
    • Do not use an apostrophe to indicate the plural form.
    Thank you.
    Legal Department, Digital Equipment Division of Compaq Computer Corporation, Houston, Texas.

  • "lowering both cost and price..."

    That makes sense if you've ever bought and sold anything..

    i.e. The OEM's cost goes down, so the selling price goes down. (or the selling price stays the same and you make more profit.. )
  • It seems like a nice chip, but sheesh...what kind of name is Alpha? Feh. I say they call it the "Alphalon" or the "Alphium". That's better, yeah.

    --John Riney
    jwriney@awod.com
  • Soon we'll be requiring licenses from people like the FCC to own a computer due to the amount of RF and other sorts of radiation they'll be giving off. It'll be unlikely we'll be allowed to build our own machines as well. Oh well.
  • You know, as these chips start to get faster and faster, they should design some functional cases/motherboards. I want to be able to cook ramen on my P3 and fry eggs with my SMP alpha.
  • What marketing Braniac thought "Athlon" would be a good name? Makes me think of athlete's foot (not a good thing) or an anorexic-looking marathon runner (not quite a good association for something you want to be speedy). The phonemes are all wrong for this.

    What AMD should shoot for are phonemes that connote strength and speed. Vehicle manufacturers are all over this -- witness "Altima" (connotations of extreme height, or peak of achievement), "Lexus" (height of snobbishness; more money than thou), "Volvo" (Latin for 'I go' -- very forceful), and even the new Suzuki "Hiyabusa" (they say it means "Falcon" but I say it has more to do with easy sex or goosing someone... :)

    I propose something radical: a consistent name. K7 was fine by me. It's got a sexy consonant (just like M, Q, R, V, X, Z -- also great for car nomenclature), and a single digit that tells me the generation of the product. What could be better?

    jon
    [with way too much time on my hands...]
  • Heh. Alpha has always been a "threat" to Intel, and Intel will never carve the right hole into Alpha until they can make the chips right.

    And as far as I know, Intel does not have any 1G chips yet, but they're getting there as halfassed as possible.

    AMD is also the same way. 'nuff said.

    So, in conclusion, Intel and AMD should focus in more on the consumer market, as that is the only place they're good at.

    Blessed Be! --"LEVIATHAN"
  • I have to take exception to your friends idea that Alphas are no good at I/OO. First of all, it doesn't make sense to talk about the memory bandwidth of a processor, and second of all, recent Alpha systems based on a crossbar architecture are very good. Looking at the Stream Benchmark (which is presumably relatively unbiased, since it is by a fellow at SGI) e.g. the DS20 is quite competetive with the latest from HP and SGI [virginia.edu]
    • Compaq DS20 1077 MB/s
    • HP_N4000 760.0 MB/s
    • SGI_Octane_300 375.3 MB/s
    Mind you, the big SGI's do scale astoundingly; its not clear that Decpaq (or anybody else) has anything that competes with a 128 processor Origin_2000 yet. Wildfire will supposedly blow our collective minds, but as yet is only running (I think) 8 processors in the labs.
    Your friendly neighbourhood alpha booster.
  • One major question about the chip is how are they going to manage to keep the chip cool so it doesn't melt your computer and still keep it economical
  • The new version of NTFS uses 64-bit block addresses. The volume size limit is in the realm of petabytes or exabytes, I believe.
  • close to 1GHz with some funky liquid gas apparatus.

    Wow! Liquid gas sounds really funky. I gotta get me some of that... :-)

  • Some thoughts/comparisons (Score:5)

    by ChrisRijk ( 1818 ) on Tuesday June 22, 1999 @11:22AM (#1838269)
    Here's some current SPEC results [spec.org]
    Some high-end SPECint/SPECfp results:
    PA-RISC 8500 @ 440Mhz 34/51.4
    21264 Alpha @ 500Mhz 27.3/57.7

    Some notes: AMD's K7, even though it has a better FP unit than P-II will 'only' get SPECfp of about 20 at 600Mhz. (don't have published info, so making guess based on that it's about 30-40% faster than P-II). Sun's next gen chip (UltraSparc-III) will apparantly get SPECint/fp of 35+/60+ at 600Mhz (no actual results yet) - it is supposedly being publicly shown at the DAC (Design Automation Conference) now, but won't ship in volume until end of the year.

    Anyone know how much the 8500 costs? It has 1.5Mb of level 1 cache - it has 150M transistors, to the Alpha 21264's 'mere' 15M. It must cost loads... This cache probably skews the SPEC results quite considerably when comparing to 'real world' cases - the SPEC marks scale pretty well with cache size I've heard... I also see that the 8500 doesn't seem to scale at all well at SPECfp as you add extra processors, compared to the other chips.

    Real world usage can vary immensly from the SPEC values, depending on what you're doing. I have friends who've compared various machines for high end computations (fluid dynamics) and they found the SGIs ran/scaled the best, even though they didn't have the best SPECfp results for a single chip - it's their massive data buses that do the trick. Actually, the PA-RISC 8500 doesn't have a complete Fortran compiler yet... Most people I know consider the Alpha to be let down by it's IO/bus data-rate,etc. Yes, it's better than PC, but it's not much compared to the other high-end RISC guys, especially SGI, though I expect this difference to change...

    A final note, a problem you get with high-speed processors is that they become nice little microwave transmittors (at 700-800+ Mhz, I think it was) and so you really need to reduce the power (the PA-RISC 8500 consumes 85W @ 440Mhz) and up the shielding when clocking at this rate, because otherwise you'd get a REAL pizza cooker/toaster in your computer...

  • I don't know where they got that, maybe DEC forgot to submit their benchmarks for consideration. The 1998 Alpha 21164a benchmarks beat the pants off the P2 and even today's P3 550. For that matter some of the SPARC and PA-RISC processors are way faster than intel.
  • All Alpha NT apps are 32bit. FX!32 is not for 32bit apps its for NT x86 native apps. If your running NT on an Alpha you should be running the Alpha native version, not the intel x86 version, that would be foolish. SQL, Exchange and most of the other important server side apps are available in Alpha native versions.

  • Cryogenic Fungible Inherited Prowess (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22, 1999 @11:43AM (#1838272)
    There's some great lines in this article. The authors should in PR or marketing.

    ...that did not require a special cryogenic equipment to keep it from overheating.

    That guy with the mineral oil cooling system is going to be disappointed. Then again, knowing this crowd somebody going to want to overclock a 1 Ghz chip. Just make sure you use special cryogenic equipment, non-special cryogenic equipment won't work.

    and puts them into a fungible package.

    Okay, raise your hands. Who didn't have to look up fungible in the dictionary.

    Compaq, which inherited the Alpha design team when it acquired Digital...

    Oh oh, who died? I don't know about you, but if my company was bought out, I would not want to be called an inherited employee.

    While universally lauded for its number-crunching prowess, the Alpha chip...

    Ooooohhh, prowess. I bet that gets the chicks everytime.

    I'm just being silly here today because, My new program...It's Alive! It Walks! It core dumps!

  • See www.alphalinux.org [alphalinux.org]

    --Peter

  • of course the K7 kills the PIII Xeon on the benchmarks. Intel should be very afraid

  • so what (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Kryotech is gonna sell a 1 Ghz AMD K7 by like this fall....

    http://www.kryotech.com/sgindex.asp [kryotech.com]
  • JC over on JC's News [jc-news.com] managed to get spec marks on a K7-550 with 1/3 speed L2 (the shipping version will have 1/2 speed L2). Check out the numbers and other good stuff yourself, but it scores 25.1/22.5 on SPECint/fp. As you have noted, though, real world performance doesn't always scale with SPEC -- although it isn't totally out of touch with reality. :) And yes, the microwave frequency is right up there around 1GHz ... I think the K7 will be in the 60W range, which is certainly better than my microwave (~800W, if I read the back of it correctly). I wouldn't run a bare processor on my desk and stare at it, though.


  • Real world usage can vary immensly from the SPEC values, depending on what you're doing. I have friends who've compared various machines for high end computations (fluid dynamics) and they found the SGIs ran/scaled the best, even though they didn't have the best SPECfp results for a single chip - it's their massive data buses that do the trick. Actually, the PA-RISC 8500 doesn't have a complete Fortran compiler yet... Most people I know consider the Alpha to be let down by it's IO/bus data-rate,etc. Yes, it's better than PC, but it's not much compared to the other high-end RISC guys, especially SGI,though I expect this difference to change...

    Of course! Don't be silly. The only way to get real numbers is to run REAL applications. Unfortunately, this becomes difficult to compare the differences in time when dealing with cross-platform issues. SPEC (read CRAP) doesn't tell you a thing other than the fact that "an elephant is bigger than a cheetah"

    GREAT! "I'll have one elephant please!"

    WRONG!

    Little does the average joe know that it really depends on several things that are HARD, VERY HARD to examine when dealing w/ cross-platform issues.

    The ISA is one (Instruction Set Archetechture).
    The compiler is another.
    (remember when companies figured out that by using "special" compiler optimizations, they could get their SPEC benchmarks in matrix alg. to go through the roof).
    Of course, cache and clock speed all matter.

    The problem is in trying to weigh these all out PROPERLY. SPEC does a 'reasonable' job, but don't read the damn thing like a BIBLE or you'll end up with your wrists slit in a bath-tub somewhere.

    Keep in mind what these are ...just tiny benchmarks... not REAL world applications... Well unless you sit around and run "Seive" all day in the back-ground just to grind out a few extra FLOPS in a day....but that would be like driving your car through Jersey to get to Manhatten, when you live in Brooklyn. (read POINTLESS waste of time)

    In a jungle ...somewhere signing off

    Blackfire
  • That was the fastest MAINSTREAM CPU, not CPU in general. The actual quote was "fastest PC microchip available in retail stores."
  • Not surprising, given the glibc fp libs were probably not the optimized version. Digital is giving them away in binary form IIRC.. Try dropping them in (I assume your test is dynamic ;)

    ps: $70k is a mite rich. Sure you didn't typo $7k? That's more like what a high-end 21164 was going for a year ago (and that's only for a DEC at retail)..
  • I saw a 5-alpha cluster today at the PC Expo in NYC.

    They were running Mandelbrot generators in the Compaq exhibit.

    Cool.
  • well yes, but thats overclocked - anyone know if alphas can be OCed? 1500 mhz sounds much better.

  • heterogeneous multiprocessing, anyone? (Score:3)

    by xeno ( 2667 ) on Tuesday June 22, 1999 @11:56AM (#1838289)
    Well, that answered half of a longstanding question: The Alpha will be interchangable with the K7 on SlotB motherboards.

    But what about heterogeneous multiprocessing on 2+ processor systems? Can I have a K7 AND an Alpha on one dual-slot board? Obviously one would have to enjoy kernel hacking (and probably BIOS hacking), but this has been a fixation of mine ever since I played with Rainbow 100 (z-80 + 8088 in the same box) and Apple II (6502 with a z-80 card). I even upgraded my Kaypro II with a 8088 daughterboard when I was in school.

    Imagine the performance gains when you can predictively send ops to a processor with an architecture best suited for the operation. Sick and twisted, I know.
  • The J5000 is "only" $20000 for the minimal dual CPU configuration, though I remember the dual-CPU cards for the V-Class machines being something like $32000. Maybe they just don't sell many V-Class boxes, whaddya think? ;-)

    Doing a little bit of guesstimating and hand-waving we could arrive at... oh, about $6000 to $8000 depending on who you believe.

    (ie. I don't recall seeing any PA-8500s at auction recently... doesn't seem like an eBay kinda item)

  • No, it's not Xeon that's being threatened by the Alpha; that chip, or at least its architecture, being Pentium-compatable, has a long and successful life ahead of it. However, Intel should well be worried about the Merced. Even if the Merced does keep up with the speed of the Alpha, Alpha systems are bound to be much more stable and less buggy simply because the Alpha's had more than half a decade of real-world use under NT and Unix. The main incentive for going with Intel at the moment is that you stay compatable; if you're going to take the hit of moving to a new processor, that advantage is lost.

    cjs

  • According to the EETimes story last week, API and another company are each developing motherboards (up to eight-way SMP) that will support either CPU. API also announced its UP1000 motherboard today as a low-cost Alpha solution - which will use AMD's Irongate chipset.

  • Now how fast can Kryotech make it? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I recall an earlier article on shashdot that talked about 600MHz Alphaz being overclocked close to 1GHz with some funky liquid gas apparatus. I wonder if this tech could boost the 1GHz Alpha to maybe 1.5GHz or so?

    What's really scary about these blindingly fast CPUs is that no one can ever hook up probes to the gates to actually see what's going on, for the probe hookup would introduce enoumous capacitance and crash the CPU. It's the uncertainty principle applied to CPUs. You can never observe what's going on, because the act of observing the CPU, changes its operation. It's all math under the ceramic case. You just trust the equations and test it like a black box.

  • Tough times for Intel? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22, 1999 @12:14PM (#1838294)
    Last week The Register posted a roadmap [microprocessors.co.uk] (leaked by Compaq, apparently) of projected SPECint95 scores for Alpha, Coppermine, and Xeon, and it don't look good for Intel. Merced rates a sorry little x at the end of the chart (turning in a SPECint95 of 46 to the 1Ghz 21264's 60); while rumor has it Willamette (Intel's all new 32-bitter) will clean up, it doesn't make the chart since it's not scheduled to arrive until Q3 next year--and that's without factoring in Intel's rather unimpressive punctuality of late. And while the SPECs weren't posted, let's not forget that Alphas have traditionally humiliated Intel chips on floating point performance. Now, take the K7^H^HAthlon (*yech*! Who came up with that one?)--with its available 2MB L2 cache and 8-way (or was it 16-way?) SMP--apparently beating Xeon performance for a whole lot less on the low end, and the new 21264 Alphas creaming them on the high end...add 64-bit Win2K for the Alpha...and finally the fact that Intel's IA-64 architecture is by all accounts late and underwhelming (at least until McKinley shows up in 2001 or 2002)...and suddenly Intel's server CPU cash cows look like dubious purchases for at least the next 2 years. As for the desktop market...the Athlon (gawd that's an awful name!) has to be the CPU of choice for cheap workstations and expensive gaming boxes; the K6 is already the fastest chip for non-FPU apps. The only reason I can think of to get an Intel CPU would be a Celeron for some cheap gaming--they still overclock a bit, but only if you're willing to run your bus at an unorthodox speed. Meanwhile, Intel's having a hell of a time getting memory companies to make Rambus DRAM that works; until then, Camino, the chipset for their new .18 micron PIII's with 256k full-speed cache, is dead in the water--it's already been pushed back until November. Oh, and nevermind that (according to Tom's Hardware at least) [tomshardware.com] RDRAM's benefit over PC133 looks to be negligable. The longer they spend fitzing around with RDRAM, the longer their stuck with a 100 Mhz bus, while the K7 (so sue me) and Alpha get 200Mhz. All of which has me wondering...in a couple of months, after the K7 becomes cheap enough to get into budget boxes...what possible reason would any computer buyer anywhere have to buy an Intel CPU (at least until Willamette)?? Oh, almost forgot. They make the internet go faster.

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