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Hardware

1.6 GHz Alpha With Transputer Features Coming? 87

Posted by Roblimo from the ultimate-quake-machine dept.
GFD writes "The Register has a story about a 1.6ghz alpha with 8 paralell rambus channels (8oomhz) and a transputer like channel to 4 other cpus (10ghz), integrated memory controller and l2 cache. Science fiction? Maybe, but oh my God what specs!!"
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1.6 GHz Alpha With Transputer Features Coming? More

1.6 GHz Alpha With Transputer Features Coming?

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  • How does the source of news affect whether a computer is a tool or not? They seem to be two completely debatable yet unrelated subjects.

    I'm a big fan of the register, and in my experience, they seem to hit the nail on the head so much more often than just about any other news site. Problem is, they generally speculate about events that haven't been announced, so it sometimes takes 3 or 6 months for stories they've reported on to actually make sense. Which they do, 75 or 80% of the time.

    So far as Alpha goes, ESPECIALLY if they're reporting it, I'll believe it to be a distinct possibility. If MSFT had said the same thing, I'd say it's marketing schpeel... But they're (MSFT) aren't exactly un-biased... (guess the register isn't either, though they're biased against liars and spin-meisters)
  • The transputer isn't dead yet - ST are still using the core inside many of their digital TV decoding chips (e.g. the ST20).

    I don't know if you can still link them together with the inmos links, so the parallelism might be out the window. The low power and good code density make them useful for embedded applications, though.

  • Transputer had problems too, sure the hardware side was really neat for their times, but the software sucked.

    OCCAMM was a good language but parallel programming is hard.
    And their C compiler was buggy according to a friend of mine who had to program these things.

    Goo hardware, poor software --> useless.

    And then, they took a loooonnng time to build a new generation of CPU (I don't remenber the number)...

    Poor C compiler + vaporware CPU equal bankrupcy, no matter how good the architecture is.
  • FX32 is or will be useless for Win32 apps... remember - MSFT and Compaq pulled the plug on future NT development for the Alpha... Remember?

    Now, I wonder if Compaq will (if it's their's to do so with) release FX32 source? That'd make the idea of an Alpha or PowerPC box running linux much more palatable.
  • Sure, the major RISC chips tend to be much more expensive than consumer chips. There's a reason for that -- cache. The only chips Intel make with a comparable amount of cache to, say, an UltraSPARC, is the high-end Xeons. Surprise, surprise -- the Xeon is just as overpriced as the others.

    Of course, even accounting for cache, the prices are artificially high, just because that's the price people are willing to pay. Profit margins on those chips are significantly higher than on commodity CPUs.

  • Re:Details of transputer architecture (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Interesting to see transputers mentioned, I cut my parallel processing teeth on them programming in Occam. Peter Welch was my professor back at University of Kent and I have been a fan of the processor ever since. Funnily enough, I am now a fan of Alphas since I got into 64 bit microparallelism, and equally a fan of Linux (currently running a 600MHz 21164 LX system at home which is very slick). Nice to see the whole lot coming full circle so to speak. I had to laugh back when Thinking Machines claimed to have invented MIMD with the CM-5 since I had been using a MEiKO computing surface with 80 transputers just a couple of years before and that was way more MIMD than the CM-5 ever was. No wonder TM when under, filling their box with sparc processors, pah! Mind you, cray filled theirs with Alphas and didn't do much better. Occam was (and still is) a fantastic language for writing pure parallel apps, the parallelism in implementations of C were always grafted on, Occam had it built in from the ground up. The US seemed to be going its own way by trying to write compilers which would derive their parallelism from serial code, never going to work. Peter was adamant the only way to do real MIMD was to ditch the "dusty decks" of old fortran code and re-implement using a real parallel programming language. Last I heard Peter was still at University of Kent in Canterbury and still doing some great work. -- Shane Sturrock, Edinburgh Biocomputing Software
  • 1.6 Gh mmmm that is getting a bit dangerous, hope they shield it well, or you either be cooked from the inside (du to the microwave radiation) or become impotent cause them radio waves will kill ya sperms

    No more chance of that than if you keep a cellphone in your pocket, I'll bet.

    --
    This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.
  • I use my tool for entertainment all the time ;-)
    The use of my tool is certainly one of my longest hobbies.
    Some people say that I am addicted to playing with my tool.
    They're probably right; but who cares?
    I better be careful with my tool; i wouldnt want to pick up any viruses through its use.
    And in thirty years, my tool will be obsolete :)

    I think the only difference between one 'tool' and another is that with computers, smaller IS better!

  • Well a decent Intel Mobo with features comparable to an Alpha MB (64-bit PCI, UW SCSI) and SMP support (to keep it's performance comparable to single processor Alpha System) will probably run you $400 - $600 dollars, then you pay x2 or x2.5 for the chip itself, but only one rather than two PIII 600's, and you're pretty much even in terms of cost, but you've got a much faster system in the Alpha - supposing the apps you want to use are available (I know, it's just a recompile, but I swear - plenty of programs exist that are I deem essential that are also commercial, proprietary, closed, whatever you want to call it)

    You really get what you pay for. If you don't need it, don't shell out the money. If you need it, then you can probably justify the outlay
  • The artical said it was going to use the EV7 bus, and I belive the k7 uses the EV6 bus. so, no they won't be compatable anymore then a pentium and a pentium II
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Transputer boards were available for many different types of personal computer, including IBM-PC and compatibles, Macs, Amiga, and Atari. Most transputers ended up embedded in things like laser printers though, allegedly, and quite a few went into fancy research machines, hundreds and thousands at a time.

    I've got one in my junk box somewhere. I should embed it in acrylic and turn it into a topical paperweight. :-)
  • Do you realize how much this beast is going to cost? No doubt it will be priced well out of the reach of those who would _want_ to play Quake.

    Even with all that speed, I guarantee that OpenGL performance will be lacking. Reason? No hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers for Alpha that I know of. And the glx driver for TNT/Matrox depends on x86-compatible assembly instructions, so that won't work.


  • But we didn't get CmdrTaco saying "I want one"

    Something is just missing
  • But will it come in colors? :)
  • Are you kidding? PixelFusion is a company making 3D graphics chips, not general purpose microprocessors.

    Big difference. Parallel graphics logic circuits do not constitute a "processor." Many logic circuits computing in parallel is "parallel processing" but is not necessarily "hundreds of processors."

    --LP
  • The 6.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth that feeds all this data into the CPU is 16x faster than Apple G4 systems' current 400 MB/sec and 8x faster than Apples "fast" 800 MB/sec motherboard coming out in a month or so. Fast memory bandwidth (and I/O bandwidth) is the difference between "supercomputer marketing" and a real supercomputer.

    The G4's flops are totally bogus because you can't feed the CPUs at those rates, at least for reasonably sized datasets that overflow the L2 cache.

    This is all "apples and oranges" comparisons of today's product versus futures though, and I'd agree that switching to Alpha would be a dumb move for Apple or Apple users.

    --LP
  • We'll call it the i-DEC :-)
  • Don't believe a thing that The Register reports. They lie so much.
  • well, but since neither Compaq or M$ supports the Alpha-NT installation, who cares?
    But Linux on Alpha hardware....
  • I mean, Alpha is rather sweet and all, but I wanna run a few games in my spare time and I'm not sure if that fx32 thing is gonna be speedy enough at 1.6 ghz to run MS Solitaire 2000.. but maybe a K7.

    Uhm anyone seen my medicine
  • The problem with this name is that it will become outdated quickly. I remember being awestruck when I saw a DUAL-P90!!! I couldn't comprehend that much power. Now a machine like that is only useful by virtue of running Linux.

  • Nope. (Score:1)

    by Skinka ( 15767 )
    Athlon (K7) uses the EV6 bus, while 21364 CPUs and motherboards use EV7.
  • MacOS X (aka Rhapsody, Son Of NeXT/OpenStep) running on one of those puppies...

    Comparatively, the 64-bit port to another RISC should be pretty easy... right...? Please say yes... please...
    *drool* *drool*
    Heh, and then I woke up... If it was ever going to happen, though, I might sell my car to get my greedy hands on one...
  • I run off of a dual 21264 (500 MHz? I forget might be 600), right now and it flies. It would be great to see some more smoke from these cpu's. But I it would be great to get some faster, cheaper hard drives to keep up with the demands of these processors. My jobs generate lots of data, and I find that writing it takes away from the cpu's a bit.

    -- Moondog
  • Whatever a "Baywolf" Cluster is... heheheh

  • Heat? (Score:3)

    by Plasmoid ( 8367 ) on Monday September 06, 1999 @05:16AM (#1700271)
    The current Alphas dissipate enough heat to cook food. Will this thing produce enough to start nuclear fusion? Will I need a liquid nitrogen cooling system?
  • So they can't be a hobby? Used for entertainment? A Computer is hardly a tool in the way a screwdriver. (If you can refute that a screwdriver is a tool, nothing more, nothing less, then please tell).
  • PixelFusion are about to bring out a chip that should make all these single processor things a bit more obsolete. Arrays of hundreds of processors, embedded within large tracts of RAM.
  • I've always thought the alphas were "neat". Never had a chance to invest in them or really work on them, but I've always been very impressed. Which is why I'm a bit sad to see this news.

    1.6gHz? Great. I really mean that. But with NT support dropped, how much of a mainstream market is there going to be?Or, more precisely, how much of a market does the architecture have now (AXPlinux , Digital Unix, NT), and how much do you think this will really change it?

    They may be on the "cutting edge" (or maybe not), but without the right PR, they're going to continue to mire in obscurity.

    Now, the alphazealots out there will rise up and shout that it doesn't mire in obscurity as it is,etc etc... Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it take a bigger share of the intel market, but it just hasn't happened up until now ... and from what this humble /.er can see (granted I have been before and I could be wrong), that doesn't seem to be changing.

  • Digital never cared about power consumption because, really, if you buy a $20K system you don't care if you pay $500/yr or $1K/yr for it. Starting with the 21264, Alphas do support a "sleep mode" with reduced (reduced to something about 20 W as opposed to the 90 W a 21264/500 MHz normally has) power consumption (Linux doesn't support that yet. It will once someone is bored enough to do it but not right now.) and I don't think there is any technical reason that could not be further reduced.
  • Yes, not only that - but when the added an FPU to the transputer, they wrote the thing in Occam first and essentially proved the design.


    Of course, I alway thought that one of the barriers to entry in the US Market was that initially one had to program them in Occam, a language containing parallel processing verbs, etc. [ Occam, as a recall, didn't have dynamic memory allocation, either... best to look around the house and find those Transputer/Occam manuals
    I squirrelled away. ] Of course, Inmos eventually offered a C compiler, but I suspect it was too late.


    Sidenote:
    I remember meeting Welch at the 3rd Conference on Hypercube Concurrent Computers in 1989; he
    did a couple of presentations on Occam and Transputers. I wonder what he's up to?


    Additional:
    At the above conference, the "Show Floor" had a number of vendors showing off hardware. One vendor had one of the first PC board add-in cards with 4 Transputers on it. My partner-in-crime and I were checking out the demo - the (now tired) generation of the Mandlebrot set. We had generated the same using an early model of the Intel Hypercube - 10 minutes per run.
    We dutifully watched the screen fill with the image and then asked the magic question, "So, how long does it take you guys to generate that image?" They looked confused, and then, realizing our question, replied, "We just did." I.e. the image (set) was being generated in about 5 seconds or so.

    That was one of only two times I have ever been truly shocked at the speed of a machine, the other being when I first watched a 486/66 boot Unix.

  • If this catches on this can drop alpha prices if this baby sells. This is also the perfect oppertunity for Compaq/Dec to piggy back on this liunx craze. I'm not a linux fan mayself, but I do like the effect that its causing: an openning of many people's eyes that there IS an alternative to MS. An alternative that costs not a penny extra to put into effect.

    If these do get very popular.. also expect prices to drop in Alpha prices...

  • PixelFusion is making general purpose chips and will be using them on graphics cards. The chips contain an array of processors, each with some memory they can work on. The individual processors were described to me as "about as complex as a Z80, but running at about 100MHz". Do you think they tricked me?
  • Awesome!
  • Is that something that happens when a sports bra is on too tight?

    --

  • Check this... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06, 1999 @06:07AM (#1700291)
    Well, according to "Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present" this is just the beginning. The Alpha was designed with this in mind from the start, "Alpha was designed for the future for a 1000-fold eventual increase in performance (10X by clock rate, 10X by superscalar execution, and 10X by multiprocessing)." Check the Alpha section: http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~bayko/cpu.html#Sec5Part4 I'd recommend reading the page in general, LOTS of great CPU info: http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~bayko/cpu.html
  • the alpha roadmap

    http://www.microprocessors.co.uk/roadmap.pdf

    21364 and 21464 Info

    http://www.microprocessors.co.uk/futures.zip

    Register Article with the two links above.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/990321-000011.html

    The futures zip file is hard to download but worth it.
  • Check out the Alpha site [digital.com].

    You can read the slides for yourself, but all that needs to be said is an estimated SPECint of 75 and a SPECfp of 120 (the best now is like, 30 and 60).

    At those rates, who needs hardware acceleration for Quake?!
  • the baywatch cluster results in a perpendicular bus interface...
  • What has the world come to. When a machine with those specs carries a comment like it should make a great quake platform. All I have to say to that is. Pack up your tool kits. Magnetize your work. The world isnt worth developing for if QUAKE is all that the work comes to. The architecture is nice. The Target Audience is misguided.

  • Details of transputer architecture (Score:5)

    by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Monday September 06, 1999 @06:30AM (#1700297)
    Transputers had at least 3 features that made them so far ahead of their time that they died through lack of applications. Or maybe it was just because the Brits and the French are lousy at bringing things to market. If only Intel had bought out Inmos ...

    Anyway, getting back to the features:

    - A process scheduler implemented in hardware (an outer loop outside the usual inner instruction fetch and execute loop), which allowed transputers to implement concurrency with very fine granularity because the context switch time was exceptionally low. (And the process scheduler was directly driven by I/O events at the transputer links, below.)

    - Four high-speed serial "Inmos links" on-chip through which the transputer could be linked directly to other transputers and to other peripherals without further glue logic, so that building multiprocessors was very inexpensive and scaled linearly. Furthermore, these links ran not only extremely quickly (for their time) despite being serial, but more importantly they ran under DMA power all simultaneously and at the same time as the processor was doing its own thing independently.

    - The above two features made the transputer exceptional for multiprocessing, but I think its instruction set was also far, far ahead of its time: not only ultra-RISC, but highly extensible too. For example, numeric literals in instructions were only as long as needed, because an extension bit would (if present) indicate that more bits were to follow if needed. This made code *extremely* tight. The scheme also allowed extensions to the instruction set to be made in a fully backward-compatible manner.

    The transputer was ultra-cool, and the world hasn't seen anything like it since. No doubt somebody will reinvent this approach some day, but probably in a US or Japanese lab, as usual, and they'll take the credit for exceptional design ideas made in an earlier age. Sigh.
  • I am starting to get very pissed off with all these "20 billion terrahertz quad mega-processor" crap. I have not seen any of this cool stuff, and until it's out and I see one, as far as I care, it doesn't exist. ARRGG. (Score:0, Redundant)

  • Units (Score:1)

    by qha ( 23486 )
    Ummm, that's 1.6GHz, 800MHz and 10GB/s.
    Agreed though, what specs!
  • Why bother?

    The peak rate for this future 1600 MHz chip is only 6.4 gigaflops with its "new SIMD 3D instructions." The current 500 MHz G4 chip peaks at 4 gigaflops with single-precision Altivec SIMD operations. That means that this future Alpha only has a 8:5 gigaflop advantage over the current PPC rather than the 16:5 advantage you would expect from the higher chip clock rate alone, plus the higher memory bus clock rate than the PC-100 RAM that the PowerMac G4s use. If this is as good as it gets compared to now, then how will it compare to higher clocked PPCs also coming in the future?

    While it'll beat the snot out any future x86 chips for awhile, it's a far sight from being worth porting away from PPC, which has a bright future ahead of it. Expect Apple to stick with the PPC. It is easily comparable in performance (though still edged out by Alpha on non-vectorized integer and FP operations), but it beats the heck out of Alpha on price, heat, and power consumption -- which is key for notebooks and low-end consumer machines. Also, the hassles of binary incompatibility makes it by far not worth the trouble.
  • The problem with PixelFusion and the other massively parallel computers like the FPGA based reprogrammable designs is that not all (or in fact most) computer problems can easily by computed in a parallel fashion.

    This is a classic of computer science. Step B requires step A to finish. Step C requires step B to finish, and step D requires step A to finish. While steps B & D can be executed in parallel since they only require step A to be finished before being done, A-B-C MUST be executed in sequence. These designs, which are much slower at sequential computation than conventional computer designs would not handle these problems as well. This is why PixelFuzion's promises are not going to hold up well. Computer scientists have struggled with the problem of parallelization of code for decades with little radical progress.
  • As Homer Simpson would say
    "Mmmmmmmm...1.6 Gigahertz."

  • Umm, no (Score:1)

    by crayz ( 1056 )
    Apple would never do that in a million years. Independent developers w/ Darwin OTOH....

  • Okay - first, someone moderate this post up right now. (No, not mine, dummy. Morgaine's.)

    That said, here's a quick question. Morgaine says:

    A process scheduler implemented in hardware (an outer loop outside the usual inner instruction fetch and execute loop), which allowed transputers to implement concurrency with very fine granularity because the context switch time was exceptionally low.

    Meanwhile, the Register article claims:

    Real time versions of Tru64 might be used in a high end arcade game console, with workstations using a more "normal" Tru64 Unix with OpenGL.

    Quake and Quake 2 are native on Alpha Linux platforms.

    Is the Register just blowing smoke here? Hardware process control would require major tweaks to the Linux kernel (wouldn't it?). And that's not even considering variable length numeric literals. The Register can speculate about gaming consoles all they want, but I want to know if they know that Compaq means to release documentation on this.

  • When i started using computers i used them for playing games, now i use them for playing games, in ten years i will be using them for playing games.
  • Do you, or anyone else, know if there are any EV6 bus Alphas compatable with K7 mobos. Obviously not binary compatable but since they both use PCI to abstract the bus away shouldn't the motherboards be compatable. If I am smoking too much crack please let me know.

    Mmmmm, K7 650 -> Alpha 1600 upgrade, *drool* *drool* *drool*!!!

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