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Alpha-Based Samsung Linux Goodness
Peter Dyck writes: "This summer Compaq divested itself of the Alpha technology. The Alpha tech was purchased by Intel who most likely will bury it after grafting its best aspects to their own 64 bit IA-64 system. However, the non-exclusive terms of the deal allowed Samsung
to continue producing and developing the best 64-bit processor architecture there is today. Now, as a happy owner of a four years old DEC AlphaPC164 I was delighted to see this announcement by Samsung Electronics. In short, the upcoming UP1500 motherboard will house a 64 bit 800+ MHz Alpha 21264B CPU, 4 GB DDR memory, 10/100 Mps LAN, USB and yes, it will run Linux."
The present CPU that is employed in Compaq machines like the AlphaServerSC and the Wildfire and in various cluster systems is the Alpha EV67 processor. The previous chip was shipped with a clock speed ranging from 666-833 Mhz. IIRC, the EV67 was able to deliver up to two floating-point results per clock cycle. The load/store units could load 16 B/cycle while the store bandwidth is slightly smaller: 10.6B/cycle. The bandwidth to memory is 5.3B/cycle, however, the type of memory determines the actual bandwidth through the bank cycle time of the memory. We were expecting a scaled up version of this chip named the EV68. It was projected to have an 833Mhz clock speed. I believe that this is perhaps some version of it.
The density used is 0.18 instead of 0.25 which enables the location of a 1.5 MB secondary cache on chip. The largest difference will be that there will be 4 dual channels from the chip to interconnect it with neighouring chips at a bandwidth of 1.6 GB/s per single channel for what Compaq has called "seamless SMP processing". The path to memory is implemented by 4x5 Rambus links as the systems will be fitted with Rambus memory. The direct I/O dual link from the chip also has a bandwidth of 1.6 GB/s. Theoretically the chip could run at speeds of upward 1Ghz.
I know that the Alpha 21264B is based loosely on the EV line of chips (more specifically the 67 and 68), can anybody further verify this with some more details? Thanks.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Would you care to have a read of here and then explain your car analogy again?
The only Good System is a Sound System
I feel like I'm feeding the troll here, but anyway...
Almost all modern apps require x-86 extensions such as MMX, SSE, and 3dNow,...
You'd only worry about this if you don't have access to your software's source. Besides, why should a non-x86 architecture support x86 features?
However, the Alpha, in keeping with the "pure RISC" philosophy, has MVI (Motion Video Instructions), which consists of a "whopping" 4 instructions (really).
Only certain flavors of Unix will run on an Alpha, while Almost all Unices, Windows, DOS, BSD, OS/2 etc. are supported by x86 based processors.
Could you please specify which "certain flavors" of Unix run on the Alpha? Where do you get the impression that x86 boxes are supported by "almost all Unices"? Last time I checked, I could not run IRIX, Tru64, or AIX on an x86 PC (there used to be an x86 version of AIX, but those days are long gone). Windows definitely did run on the Alpha (up to NT 4.0). FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD also run on it. And bringing up DOS, OS/2, or OpenVMS is not worth the trouble, as they only run on a single platform (Yes, I know about OS/2 on PPC, but did anyone pay attention? NT/Alpha got a lot more usage than that).
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I believe the comparison you are talking about is here: www.compaq.com/hpc/ref/ref_alpha_ia64.pdf
Better get it quick before it mysterisouly disappears like all other pro-Alpha/anti-IA64 material...
Bill
One obvious problem is that divide by zero causes a seg fault. Lots of code I have does things like:
{double A = B/C; if (C!=0) do_something(A);}
The fact that I divided by zero is irrelevant because the result is ignored later. Finding these and rewriting them is a major pain in the ass.
You can compile with -mieee to get pretty good emulation, but that turns off all the parallel pipelines and slows things by 15% or so.
>How come Intel chips have increased clock speed by a factor of 20 while Alpha have increased by a factor of 3?
,and some powerusers/scientists, noticed.
Without going too technical, intel designed it's pentium IV to be highly scalable in speed (but look at how poor it performs mhz/mhz-wise compared with AMD), Alpha had a good design from the start and they've built around it, intel went for the marketting hype machine.
Also keep in mind that since over 2 years, not much work or funding has been put on Alpha technology... basically it's the same chip with more cache, reducing die size to increase clock speed and stick yet more cache, nothing much, nothing new, intel did the same with the pentium II/III... but in the same timeframe, intel pushed a lot of R&D and $$$ to pump out it's next generation processors. There's NO DOUBT that with the same energy, you'd probably have a 21464 making the IA64 a bigger joke that it is right now.
The thing that pisses me the most in this story, is I come from an amiga background, I had a lot of respect for both alpha and Mips back then (remember the Raptor Screamernet renderfarm (Mips-based) that you'd stick near you amiga toaster system and it would render 25 to 40 times faster?, or the first lightwave port to alpha, screaming over 40 times the speed or my poor amiga 4000?), I knew that if my platform would eventually die, I'd have a supersweet alternative.
But what happened? Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows2000 on the alpha, ok no problem, there's still some unix alternatives (but kiss goodbye to seeing alpha as a powerfull Windows workstation), and like if that wasn't enough, compaq bought it, waited, left it to die.. just like gateway did with the amiga. Wait till the technology gets too old (funny fact is even 2 years later the alpha CPU is still good and can be compared to current systems...2 years.... think about it).
Anyways, the treatment the Alpha got is so unfair, it went the same way MIPS went, same way amiga went, and it's a proof that it's not the best technologies that wins. When I was still dreaming about seeing Win2K on alpha, and Compaq released it's workstation shortly after buying DEC, I knew there was something wrong because they would NEVER compare to intel, NEVER. but NEVER I thought that one day, the potential INTEL competitor would get bought by.... INTEL.
Here goes my dream of seeing intel shoving 64bits technology into mainstream and normal people and general benchmarks sites noticing "hey, speaking of 64 bits, there's that Alpha processor that is 3 times faster... woah 3times?!? it's worth to check!!! it might be the next AMD!"
It is.. (even if it's pre-amd) only geeks like us
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.