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Alpha 21364 EV7 Specs Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the waiting-for-opteron dept.

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. "

3 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. How sad... by Glock27 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    to see Itanium steamroller a much better architecture.

    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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    1. Re:How sad... by stripes · · Score: 5, Insightful
      How could a glorified x86 chip with a broken/inefficient instruction set possibly be better than a chip with a new from-scratch architecture.

      Well you have the x86 with basically all the market forces behind it driving huge R&D budgets...that's how the x86 managed to slam the MIPS, SPARC, POWER, and pretty much all the other RISC chips. It doesn't matter that you are basically sticking solid rockets onto a large not-so-aerodyanic brick. It flys.

      That's the past. Now in the present we have the same market forces behind the x86, and a stunningly bizzare new creature called the IA64, which may not be the poster child for "broken/inefficient", but is clearly a great one for "will drive compiler writers over the brink into the spinning abyss of madness". It is definitly stunningly hard to write things for, that's for sure. More so in most cases then figuring what "RISCops" your x86 instructions are broken into, and where they are shoved, how long that takes, and what a better set would be.

      Intel will send you the IA64 instruction set manuals for free. Go take a peak...if your mind is strong. Or you don't mind a bit of gibbering.

  2. Re:The Hammer is NOT a good thing... by Glock27 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Sorry I didn't reply sooner, I was away from the keyboard most of yesterday.

    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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