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?

Comments

Re:problem is...binary compatibility

[YU Nicks NE Way]

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.)