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Alpha 21364 EV7 Specs Released
Jon Carroll writes " HP has revealed their Alpha roadmap
today at RDF and the schedule goes
as previously planned. Alpha 21364 (EV7) is based on 0.18 micron to be shipped
by this year end and EV79 based on 0.13 micron SOI will be up next. EV7 will be
at 1.2Ghz while EV79 will be at 1.6Ghz. The Alpha 21364 EV7 chip will have 152M
transistors, 1.75MB integrated on-die L2 cache, 32GB/s of network bandwidth,
integrated RDRAM memory controller with 8 channels up to 12.8GB/s of memory
bandwidth. "
Alpha is brilliant, too bad it didn't receive the development and marketing dollars it deserved. Compaq should be ashamed.
Thank goodness AMD is here to take up the slack with Hammer! =)
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This sounds to me like a standard compilers loop unrolling optimization. Almost all modern processors run this kind of code faster. Sounds like you had a cool compiler, though the alpha itself is cool for other reasons.
Why do they use 0.18 by the end of the year?
0.13 schould be capable of such a chip.
IBM uses 0.13 already for their power4.
One of the foundries like UMC or TSMC would be proude to produce the alpha.
This is kinda weird. Certainly, no new customers (usually corporate/research, i.e. not hackers) would buy a chip that will be discontinued and it looks like HP itself acknowledges that:
AlphaServer systems will be focused on the Alpha installed base. - from the press release sited above.
But this also means that of the existing customers, probably only those who can't find another alternative soon will buy the new Alpha. Seems like kind of a harsh thing to do the Alpha. If they (Compaq) released this chip then said that they were stopping the line, that would be one thing, but in this case, they're stopping the line before releasing the chip! This is certainly a bizarre move.
You are right, in that I cannot correct you in any way, but you have to admit... x86 is backward compatible with the 8086*... That may (!) not matter any more but they have done a f##king good job... Credit where it's due and all that... Don't you think?
No doubt. If it wasn't clear from my post: the fact that AMD and Intel can get almost equivalent single-CPU SPEC performance (and SPEC is oriented toward workstation/server/HPC workloads!) to the top 64-bit CPUs, despite maintaining backwards compatability with a much uglier ISA and costing ~50x less, is a huge credit to their engineering teams. As well as pretty strong proof that the fitness of your ISA is much less important than the manufacturing process you use and the engineering resources you have.
And second, while it of course no longer matters than the P4/Athlon are backwards compatible with the 8086, it mattered hugely that the 286 was, and that the 386 was compatible with the 286, and so on. Tremendously. The immense size of the x86 backwards compatible market has meant that Intel and AMD sell their CPUs in volumes large enough to make owning their own fabs (and keeping them on the cutting edge of process tech) worthwhile...which in turn is what has kept x86 performance so competitive (along with other effects from selling into such a huge market).
You're characterization about the x86 architecture and PC history is completely wrong. It's one of those tales about an innocent comment that has been passed down from mouth to mouth and along the way the details have gotten embellished completely out of proportion. Having been an assembly language programmer in the x86 world, I know what I'm talking about. There was nothing hard to learn about the x86 instruction set, it was actually quite useful because there were so many complex instructions to choose from that could do some complex tasks with a single instruction. If you didn't feel like learning all of the complex instructions, you could stick to the common instructions to do everything you want.
Now, the problems with the x86 instruction set that have been embellished out of proportion have all been basically taken care of over the years and fixed, but the bashing still continues. It continues mostly from people who aren't aware the problems have been fixed because they are simply bashers for the sake of bashing. One deficiency about the x86 was its integer register set: it was too small, only 8 general purpose integer registers, and in some of the more complex instructions, only specific GPRs could be used. This has been taken care of by the x86-64 instruction set, they doubled the registerset to 16, and these registers are truly general-purpose. Then there is wierdness about the stack-based floating-point unit: again this has been taken care of because they are using SSE for floating point which uses random-access floating point registers rather than stack-based. Still there were some advantages to using the stack-based FPU, such some of the complex floating point instructions you got with it, such as tangents, sines, cosines, logarithms, etc.
Now, your knowledge of PC history is woefully inaccurate. When IBM tried to make its powergrab with the PS/2 hardware and OS/2 software architectures, it wasn't trying to get rid of the x86 instruction set. On the contrary, it was getting much deeper into x86 than at any point in its past. With PS/2, it had tried to change away from the ISA bus towards a new generation bus called MCA, without accomodating the existing ISA bus; the shift away from ISA wouldn't successfully take place until many years later when they introduced the PCI bus, which maintained backwards compatibility with ISA. PCI was successful because it allowed a gradual transition away from ISA, MCA on the other hand tried to force everyone to switch away completely all at once. The OS/2 operating system was a similar story, it actually tried to use the x86 architecture in greater depth than any OS previously, by using the 286's new "Protected" operating mode, which gave access to much larger amounts of memory. The only problem was that the 286's Protected mode was not yet full featured, it was more of a running experiment, and it wouldn't become truly useful until the 386 came along and added all kinds of features to Protected mode that allowed for greater flexibility and backwards-compatibility at the same time.
The sooner we kill the x86 architecture, the better. It was ancient 15 years ago. Humanity gave up horses and slaves in favor of automobiles and machinery. We can give up the old x86 architecture for something better. Maintaining it is inhumane.
This is a silly argument, for two reasons.
First, almost all programmers can (thankfully) ignore the underlying instruction set and program in a higher level language - therefore it is irrelevant. x86-64 is actually quite an improvement over IA32 regardless.
Second, if an instruction set is sufficiently efficient to allow the processor to be the fastest microprocessor in the world, it can't be so bad - can it? If my information is correct, Hammer and Opteron will debut with absolutely world-class performance. This isn't so surprising, given that many ex-Alpha engineers are working on it.
Backwards compatibility is simply a nice bonus, which will be crucial in Hammer attaining critcal mass quickly.
Time to pick up some AMD stock!!! =)
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