1.4-1.6 GHz Alphas

maniack writes, "Looks like the Alpha is striking back at AMD and Intel after a quiet period. Eetimes.com has a story on new Alpha processors from 1.4-1.6 GHz being available by the end of the year despite rumors of Samsung pulling out of the processor market. Keep in mind that this is a 64 bit processor, so there will be a lot of competition in the that arena. " At this point, much of it is still conjecture, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

Comments

Keep in mind- Intel is a moving target too

[LinuxParanoid]

This is good news for Alpha, but the delivery date will leave them under substantial pressure this fall and even after the new Alphas come out for two reasons:

• Intel's Willamette will be out in Q3 running at 1.1 GHz to at least 1.4 GHz, coming pretty close or equal to these Alphas on megahertz, and likely on SPECint (integer and branching performance where Intel typically lags Alpha by 5-50%.) The proper comparison is current -products-to-current-products or future-at-dateX to future-at-dateX products, not current-to-future.
• Alpha's pre-eminence in floating point is about to drop sharply due to Itanium and Willamette products from Intel with substantially improved floating point (many more fp execution units). Alpha has traditionally provided 3x the floating point of Intel. About 3-4 years ago, Intel realized that floating point was useful for the mass market (3D games) and the workstation space they were starting to enter, and these two processor cores are the first to reflect significant prioritization of floating point from Intel (SSE in Pentium III was a minor modification of a existing core design.)
  • While Intel has kept this mostly under wraps, some details have leaked out indicating that Willamette/Foster (Foster is the "Xeon" version of Willamette) will have equal or better floating point than Itanium, and Itanium's floating point has been publicly characterized in things like Kenneth's Intel roadmap. Note that the existence of only 8 registers on IA32 designs like Willamette probably substantially restrains performance on real apps. Intel will add 144 new SSE2 instructions according to Sharky and eliminate the switch time previously required when going from regular fp to SSE instructions. The memory bandwidth gap between Alpha and Intel will also narrow with Willamette/Itanium.)

Net: Intel may be about to catch up a significant amount on floating point, a historic Alpha differentiator, and Intel clock rates and integer/branch performance definitely keep pace at the 1-2 GHz levels.

--LP