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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 UP1500 was developed long before the Compaq/Intel Alphacide... it is not clear whether Samsung has any intention of continuing to support Alpha.
With that said, I feel that Intel makes a superior processor and Alpha's are already a bit outdated. Almost all modern apps require x-86 extensions such as MMX, SSE, and 3dNow, which Alphas do not support. I'd rather be running a hardware platform which supports these innovations and allows software to overcome x86 limitations. Alpha's are 64 bit processors, and they are quite fast, but they do not offer the specialised hardware instructions that x86 supports. Alpha's are like 1960's muscle cars. They're fast, but only because of the brute force under the hood. X86 machines are sleek and smoothe like a Porche because they use brilliant engineering and specialised extensions like SSE. I'll take the Porche over the outdated horsepower any day.
Furthermore, Alphas are limited in the software platforms on which they support. 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.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
You have to go to the link, and make sure to look at the large image near the bottom.
The image shows the 32bit pci bus only running at 33Mhz! I mean... I own a DIGITAL AlphaStation 4/233, and it has a 33Mhz. THis box is from 97.
Just guessing from what I saw on the page... the kit is a strange malgamation of old, and new technology. The system has 133Mhz, btw nothing new for Alpha, for the memory bus, but not the pci bus.
So... its is 64 bits.... but it isn't that special either.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
The Alpha was a good architecture for the time, but with 2+GHz Pentiums I can't see getting excited about a 64 bit workstation. Especially from Samsung, who to the best of my knowledge has never been a player in the workstation market. Workstations are pretty much gone as a market, Sun seems to be the only people staying afloat, SGI is dead, HP has sold thier soul to Intel. The x86 architecture isn't that great but they got the bucks to continue development and beat other better architectures by shear size of thier warchest. I hate to admit it but good engineering often looses to strong marketing (kinda makes you want to cry), but thats the unfortunate truth. I'm not sure if IA-64 will do that well, I think its going to be a tough transition, Intel will probably be forced to make more generations of x86 and AMD seems to be beating them using a lower clock rate, so it may just be a good time to invest in AMD. Its about time that somre revolutionary architecture comes in a shakes things up, things like StrongARM are a step in the right direction, but not really competive for desktop. Transmeta has great technology, but why buy a simulation when you can afford the real thing, Intel has improved their technology by borrowing from Transmeta so Intel in getting ahead and Transmeta without the huge sums of cash is falling further and further behind.
While there is no doubt that there is lot of cruft in the x86, you have to give Intel credit for getting way more performance out of it than anyone thought they wood. I remember back in the early 90s everyone kept talking about how RISC was going to kick Intel's ass for these very reasons: they would never be able to overcome the limitations of having to support backward compatibility. Yet, they are still standing, and RISC's advantages are very small in real terms.
You should probably doublecheck your sources, as they seem to have misinformed you on a couple of points.
Firstly, the past several generations _are_ RISC chips, with a wrapper around them that translates x86 instructions. This is why Intel chips have more decode stages in the pipeline than any clean architecture would (and why they were so eager to use a trace cache in the Itanium - among other things, it lets them skip the decode stages for instruction batches the processor has seen recently).
Secondly, there is a *huge* performance difference in practice between RISC and CISC architectures, for the simple reason that you can't pipeline CISC processors. You have instructions that do wildly varying amounts of work, taking wildly varying amounts of time to do it, sometimes without the total execution time being known (like the "loop" and "rep [foo]" instructions). Pipelining requires an instruction set with instructions that take roughly the same amount of time and that share many steps in common between instructions. RISC neatly provides all of this.
You can partially pipeline a CISC machine by only pipelining some types of instruction - heck, even a RISC machine will need to special-case things like divide operations - but pipelining is far, far more effective with a RISC architecture.
This was one more nail in the coffin of CISC cores (there are serious hardware and compiler complexity problems too).
somewhat expensive? $15000 for a 1U Dual-21264B node with 256Mb and a 9Gb drive according to Microway's website. I know it's a specialised market and scaling doesn't work lineraly, but you can get a lot of Dual P3-1Ghz for $15000. The memory consideration would have to be very important to you.
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