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IBM To Produce Copper Alphas For Compaq
LinuxGeek writes: "IBM will be producing copper interconnect Alpha CPUs. The samples are already running 1.2GHz. Hopefully they can make them cheap and plentiful."
Similarly, sokoban
writes:
"News.com is reporting that IBM is planning to manufacture Copper Alpha
CPU's. Now that is a fast piece of equipment. Here is the
link." And nobody ever got fired for buying ... err, Alphas. Soon, 32-bit will seem so quaint, eh?
Right. Just the other day I was mulling over perhaps getting a medium to a low-range Alpha. And I reached a conclusion that the high price is the real problem with Alphas.
I think it's mostly has to do with the fact that Compaq, it seems, doesn't really want to market this hardware to consumers. Here I was, seriously considering one, but...
For starters, there doesn't appear to be a lot of places selling those things out there. I've tried searching the 'Net, I didn't find anything. I couldn't believe it when I searched shop.yahoo.com, which basically aggregates hundreds (if not thousands) of merchants' e-commerce shops under one roof, and came up dry.
After I went to Ground Zero -- Compaq -- I came away with a discreet impression that they really don't want to talk to a mere peon like me. Their web site, apparently, is really put together more like a business-to-business (or government) type of a deal.
That's really a shame. I think that I'm not the only one who might be interested in looking into alternatives to the x86 platforms. If Compaq only invested a small portion of that R&D that went into this newfangled chip into, instead, investing in marketing the Alpha to consumers, they might find themselves a nice niche amongst consumers too.
According to this EETimes article, high-frequency induction is a growing concern. It cites an academic paper stating "copper is much more problematic than aluminum when it comes to inductance...."
SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- The perils of chip design at 0.18 micron and below mandate new research in a number of areas, according to presenters at the recent International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) 2000 here. Calls were made for breakthroughs in areas such as power analysis and estimation, inductance modeling, analog layout, incremental CAD and process variability.
Beyond academic papers, this year's ISPD included a keynote speech by Aart de Geus, chairman and chief executive officer of Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) In his keynote speech, de Geus called for better estimation and analysis tools, and for attention to new problems such as inductance.
"Finally, after 25 years, inductance is coming back," de Geus said. "With high current, inductance does matter." But it won't be a big issue for most designers, he added, until feature sizes drop below 0.18 micron.
A paper given by Li-Fu Chang of Frequency Technology Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) outlined that company's research in inductance modeling of on-chip copper interconnects. Copper is much more problematic than aluminum when it comes to inductance, the paper notes.
Chang said the paper presents a "full chip" inductance modeling architecture. "Inductance modeling is much harder work than Rs and Cs [resistance and capacitance]," he noted.
How much do you want to bet that when I try to specify copper Alphas, that dimwit teenager in Academic Purchasing (who thinks he's 3l337 because he can remember the HardOCP URL 2 times out of three) will get me a stack'o'coppermines instead?
Oh, and think of all the lovely conversations you'll overhear waiting in line with that last Y power connector for your Beowulf as the wannabe Mr. Know-it-alls ("I order all my systems on-line!") tie up the Saturday salesclerks with impossibly self-contradictory orders.
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Well, it would seem that the future is in Copper interconects. I'm just wondering what is Intel going to do about it. Last time I read up on it they refuzed to license the technology from IBM.
Anything I missed? Is Intel going to go Copper, or are they just going to keep on naming their processors so that they sound like it?
2 letters : vi.
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Yes, these things will totally kick ass, but if you use gcc and glibm it would be like running 80 octane gasoline in a Corvette. This is a brand new architecture that the gnu development is years behind on. Compaq has compilers, libraries and prebuilt apps that run _much_ faster. I don't think anything has been done to gcc since the EV5 architecture.
The Compaq tools are mostly available for free, but you can't compile kernels with them. We're trying to catalog what can actually be compiled with them but most Linux system source assumes that you are using gcc. Sad, really. I'm sure that things would run much better when using a compiler that actually knows how many execution units the processor has...
So, on another note, anyone know of anyplace (on the web or otherwise) that I can find out exactly what IS up with BIG_ENDIAN and LITTLE_ENDIAN? I'm not going to be using a BIG_ENDIAN machine anytime soon, but I've always been interested.
Do you want the literary reference from which the names are taken? (Swift, _Gulliver's Travels_, Book 1, "The Voyage to Lilliput". There were two tribes of Lilliputians who were fighting a war over whether one should eat one's breakfast egg from the big end (the Big-Endians) or the little end (the Little-Endians). I never can remember which tribe Gulliver was allied with, so don't ask me.) Or do you want the technical explanation of why Intel puts the bytes in a word "backwards", so that you can't read the characters in a UCS-2 string from the bytes? (It turns out that arithmetic operators cost half as many transistors/operator if the bit order goes from lowest-order bit to highest-order bit, as in an Intel chip, than they do if the bit order is highest-order bit first. It doesn't make all that much of a difference any more, since the transistor count on the ALU is only a tiny fraction of the cost of the chip, but in the old days, it mattered very much indeed. I can't ever remember which tribe I'm allied with, so don't ask me.)