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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.
Most extended instruction sets (MMX,SSE,3dNow,Veocity) that work on large chunks of floating point data at a time are not designed for accuracy - they are designed for speed. In an environment where precision is required only IEEE floating point is of vale - the extended instructions are great for Quake, Photoshop and benchmarks, but hopefully nobody is using them for real work.
You assertion that X86 processors are 'brilliant engineering' is a but odd - X86 processors have a lot of cruft around to deal with old 8-Bit,16-Bit (Real and Protected) and 32-Bit modes. The Alpha and other chips that have been introduced in the last few years don't have all that garbage lying around and can concentrate on doing things correctly - where X86 designeres spend a lot of time making the things backwards compatible. Instead of being a 'Porche' as you described it - they end up being a VW Bug with a turbine engine graftwed on the hood - it works but it sure is ugly.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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.
Almost all modern apps require hacks like MMX and 3DNow? (Realize that while you're using either of those, you can't use the floating point pipeline because it uses some of the same paths as the SIMD engine. Also note that it costs cycles to switch back and forth and if you're not doing LOTS of matrix math, you're not going to use them- you're going to use hand tuned floating point/integer code.) How many really, really use them? Not a lot of them, in reality.
x86 has hacks to get SIMD instructions, limited register spaces, weaker floating point, etc. AltiVec is a more rational scheme and PPC CPUs have much more useful register sets and rational instruction sets, and it's floating point is nearly twice as fast.
Hacks do not a "Porche" make. To use your analogy completely, the x86 is a Mustang GT to the PPC's Porche. Both will get you there. Both go fast- but one is higher performance and handles better.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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).