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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
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