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Alphas get Cheaper?
zealot writes "Check out this article at The Register for info about cheap Samsung Alpha Processors. It costs $250 for a 533 MHz when ordered in volume (1000 procs or more). Now if we could just find a middle man to buy in bulk and sell them for, say $300. "
I propose that the officers of the SCU authorize the bulk-purchase and resell (at a modest profit) of 5000 processors. Any profit, of course, goes back into our credit union.
that were talking about 800mhz processors in there for the same price...
in spring....and servers with a linux/Alpha combination at the fraction of the cost as a wintel machine
???
some 1GHz at home?
Ah, my friend, that is my name. I am a third cousing to Noel Coward but am frequently confused with that MEEPT bastard.
/. for the unauthorized downloading of my name. Goodnoise.com has already given me a 1% cut of any transaction containing the text 'Anonymous Coward.'
In fact, the confusion has become such a nuisance to me that I am considering legal action against
Best,
Anonymous 'Bucky' Coward, II
;-)
If Gateway is willing to put a high end Xeon in
a home pc I think Compaq (or some decent 2nd tier
maker) should do the same with Alpha.
hell, at $250 / 1000, anyone want to go in on a 1000 - processor array? wonder what kind of keyrate that would get...
That fx32 Microsoft-sanctified WIN32 emulation thingy, is its (development/licensing) cost somehow included in the price of Alphas?
I already paid for unused 'doze license once in the form of "WIN-OS2"... yuck, never more.
hey we should start a fund where /. users can commit to buying a part within a given time frame, enter credit card info, and if the volume reaches 1000 or whatever, buy them! /. could take a small percentage, and we would all get great discounts...we could start making people sell thru /. and get all our cool hardware for free
samedi@disinfo.net
It is a complete rumormongering site. Given
that roughly half the articles I see there
turn out to be baseless, wrong, or both,
I just don't put any faith in their predictions.
I would be EXTREMELY surprised to see $250
EV6's anytime soon, and 800 Mhz EV5.6's would
be even more of a shock...
I've got a 500Mhz 21164, I've heard rumors of people getting them up to 600Mhz, but it's too expensive to experiment with that hardware. If I can get a 533 for $250 I might be willing to push it...
Digital Developed FX!32 on their own a few years ago. It is downloadable for free from their ftp site. M$ will be bundling it with Windows2000. Your not paying for FX!32 licensing fees when you buy an Alpha but of course profits from Alpha sales funded the development of FX!32 in the first place.
Hmmm... the 21164 tops out over 600MHz at .35 micron; at .25 micron I would expect better performance out of the 21264. Digital has always been able to squeeze more MHz out of any given process size than the other chip makers.
Wait a minute. Since when did the 21164 reach 600 MHz at 0.35 micron? The only way to do that would be to use ECL or some other purely bipolar technology for parts of the chip, which would cause it to melt into slag without liquid cooling.
The linewidth for the 21164s that I've seen listed wasn't specified, but I'd guess 0.25 simply because it's been available for a while and would give them almost a factor of 2 speed increase over 0.35 versions without needing substantial redesign.
Alpha Roadmap .25 micron and gets 600 with .28. The 21264 on .28 should reach 750MHz by mid-1999 and it should reach 1GHz on .18 in the 2H-1999. Of course the big one, the 21364 (EV7 core), will be out 1H 2000, probably around the same time as Merced is expected and the 21364 *starts* at 1Gz, but then again once your running that fast, speed doesn't mean so much anymore, we'll all be looking at the piplining aspects and other architectural improvements of the NG processors when comparing performance rather than just look at fast it's clockspeed is...
This is a slide from the presentation made at last years microprocessor conference (whatever that thing is called). The 21164 max's out at 533 on
Vague mental gropings into the mists of history here... .5 microns with EV5. EV5.6 went to .35 microns and hit 500+MHz. Since the 21164 is still classed as EV5.6 not EV5.6A or 5.7 one would be led to believe that it is 'still' .35 micron as incredible as that seems. I haven't found a reference one way or the other though. The only clue is that the 533MHz supposedly dissipate around 60 watts.
IIRC DEC hit 300MHz at
Intel Celeron
400 MHz $200
(in quantities of 1)
Sure it isn't as fast as a PPC 750, but a 400 MHz Celeron is cheaper than a 333 MHz PPC. I love my Mac, but there's just no way to get around the fact that PPCs are expensive.
*But* the article says 800 Mhz...Anyone know anything about an EV5.7 shrink to
might believe the story then...
The Fortran compiler for Digital Unix produces code which is much more efficient than the code produced by the equivalent Linux compiler. Unfortunately, most of the scientific codes still use Fortran. Does anyone know:
1) How to run the Digital compiler on Alpha
Linux? (A workaround is to compile the code
on a Alpha running Digital Unix, and then to transfer the binary to the Alpha running Linux,
as the binary should be compatible, but this is a bad solution...)
2) Is Compaq planning to port its Digital Fortran compiler to Alpha Linux?
Thanks!
Hullo, this is Linux!
Username: root
Password: Stairway2Heaven
..still it doesn't matter because of the huge power usage, and bills and fan noise or missing refridgerating area [:=)
Kewl...now I can upgrade 1/3 as often!
IBM still had to pay a licensing fee to MS. This is why OS/2 without Windows cost so much less than OS/2 with Windows.
Will
Too bad the only way to play any older games would be to use fx32. If only OrangePC cards worked in other computers besides the Macintosh.
What I would like is a PCI backbone system where I could keep all my cards, and just replace the cpu card. Then I could try a PowerPC, Alpha, StrongARM, maybe a muliprocessor card, whatever... the rest of my system stays put and all I have to do is recompile the binaries.
:-) --
Filter
-- It's all GNU to me
I don't know the per-item breakdown, but last month I bought a dozen 533 systems with 2 MB L3 and 256 MBs for a little over $2k each. That included two 10/100 tulip NICs and an 8.4 GB EIDE HD in each system. No graphics, keyboard, etc. So your prices seem reasonable.
I wish someone would produce PowerPC linux boxes; I sure would buy one! Motorola should start making them!
I'd love to be able to heat my house with one of these babies!
Now maybe I'll finally be able to afford it.
I am typing this from a DEC Alpha 500au (PWS) system with 128M ram, 4.3GB UW disk, with all the trimmings. Cost less than $2000 for the whole system, delivered FedEx.
Believe me, the system beats the hell out of the equivalently-priced SX system (which usually comes with only 64M ram and an IDE disk).
A good PC motherboard like the ABIT BH6 is $105.00.
An Alpha motherboard might cost 10 times that.
Why is using the binary compiled under DU a bad solution? That's what I did for some time.
Although, I'm not sure that's legal...
Gumber sez:
I think that this is an excellent idea. A sort of on-line hardware purchasing co-op.
To the nay-sayer: The rest of the system is no more expensive than the rest of an ordinary PC, provided a motherboard could be had at a similarly low price. The things use PC components. There is no magic that somehow makes them more expensive.
Careful, there are a lot of different Alphas.
The 21164PC lacks an on chip L2 cache and the Int and FP numbers are hurt as a result (it does have some media instructions). At a given clock rate, these aren't much faster than a PII
The 21164 (I think the higher clocked versions are called the 2164a) is a bit faster than a PII at the same clock on Integer and available at somewhat higher clock speeds. FP, on the other hand is 1.5 - 2x higher, depending on the L3 cache size. 18 months ago I could get these for about $1500 more than a dual PII 266.
The 21264 is a different story. It is roughly 2x as fast as an Intel chip at the same clock on Integer. ( FP is probably 3-4x higher) and is available at 533 MHz and above. I have no idea what these things go for.
Gumber sez:
Careful, the 21264 is a whole nother implementation of the Alpha ISA. It is quite a bit more complex than the 21164, which is why it gets roughly 2x the performance at the same clock speed.
The keyrate would be a good use for the spare cycles that the distributed machine wasn't using to make the MegaBucks for Slashdot, FSF, etc...
I mean....look how much Titanic made using ~100 alphas....what's Lucas' phone number again?
In environments where 64 bit computing really matters and isn't just a dick size issue, you'll find more UltraSPARCs than anything else. That's because while the Alpha really is a nice chip, Digital/Compaq puts it on a total piece of shit system.
If 64 bits matters to you then most likely you're working with huge amounts of data, and the last thing you need is a system that's as I/O bound as a typical Alpha box. Alpha based systems just do not have the system bandwidth that you find with Sun's UPA interconnect.
Don't get me wrong, Alpha is a great chip and I'm glad they're getting so cheap. I'll probably buy one for my own use. At work, I'll continue to recommend Sun boxen for data warehousing and decision support systems.
The ones without cache do suck. But the 128k versions are awesome! :-)
I had a PII 300Mhz. I was looking at info (a while ago now), and discovered the Celerons could overclock to 450, no problem.
I sold my PII and got a Celeron 300a, popped it in, overclocked to 450, no problem. Even at 300 they are faster in games (Quake?)
This is because the cache is running at the full speed of the processor, instead of the half speed that the PIIs run at.
Another thing is that the first 128k of memory is the most important. It caches that a certain way, then the rest of the 512k you could call a random grab. It's far less accurate than the first 128k.
This makes the Celeron an awesome CPU for a low price!
--GO Celery!--
Samsung makes 21164a's in 0.35 um at up to 667 MHz.
They are supposed to start churning out 21264's in 0.28 (or 0.25, conflicting reports) RSN, with the top speed bin likely to be 750 or 800 MHz.
What a brilliant idea. I'll bet it could be made to fly.
Manufactures would love a beta test market like us; I should think; we'd even pay for the chance.
You are comparing apples with watermelons.
The currently available Intel processors
are as fast as Alpha was three years ago
(and only in integer performance: in floating
point Intel still sucks raw eggs.)
The greatest vaporhardware of all time, Merced,
is *assumed* to be in the same league with the already existing Alpha processors. I guess your knowledge of processors amounts to comparing
their MHz.
Because half your profits would go to tax, unless you tried to create a non-profit organization, but I've heard this is a beuraucratic nightmare.
-Paul
Have you actually compared the price of /1000 units and single units online? Most of the companies listed in pricewatch.com and shopper.com are operating at razor thin profit margins (if any e.g. buy.com supposedly runs at 0% profit gleaning all revenue from advertising).
You're only going to save a few dollars buying in bulk for these things, and if you order from a real company you can send it back if you have a problem and there's someone to call if you don't get what you want 24hours/day. Unless Rob is going to start manning his phone to answer calls, I don't think this is going to work out very well. Not to mention the fact that shipping costs are cheaper for larger companies then small ones.
Of course, if the online computer vendors don't pick up the Alpha chips, then I suppose it would be better to get together and buy a lot and split it up.
hmmmm.
-Paul
Hehe fuck off, you little bitch :)
They should strip the x86 translation stuff off the AMD K6 and K7 and sell the native chip. That would be cool!
Eh, I found 21164/633MHz 2MB cache for sale here in Sweden at $3000. Dunno if it is Samsung or what micron it has.
You get 16 SPECint95 and 24 SPECfp95 @533MHz with the Alpha.
You get 17 SPECint95 and 13 SPECfp95 @450MHz with the Celeron300A.
No big win at regular use (int), twice the FPU for $???? (include mobo, etc.).
The big question: What will I win with this? Will it run Q3 faster? Has anyone seen any Q1/Q2 benchmarks? Nope. Is Alpha a hype? Dunno.
It runs CAD much better than x86, though.
Please enlighten us, somebody!
This SMP thing bothers me.
Shouldn't our goal be to make extremely cheap, really simple processors (RISC, MISC) that we can just simply stick into our machines in waves?
I mean, just picture having this huge plain of pin-slots on your motherboard that has room for say, 20 processors on it, and as you buy more, you simply turn the system off, stick them on, and reboot the system.
(Make it hot-swappable if you're a real hacker)
As time goes on and cpu prices drop, you can change your 5 processor fledgling into a 10 or 15 processor beast without having to completely toss away your prior investment (kind of like how we see if we can make our 386 processors stick to the wall if we throw them hard enough).
But then again, I'm not an electronics engineer, just a silly little programmer with fantasies.
--Michael Bacarella
compile mozilla (i think it can use gtk).
Canadian AC
www.microux.com
At one time I saw a post saying they were supporting Linux, although preconfigured seems to be AIX.
They look a little pricey although the site hasn't been updated in a while.
Yeah, who really is reading that as 25 cents per chip...
Still, imaging the power of 1000 alpha computers. Go for it in a DES4...
Glad to see that /. hasn't given in and used a Compaq logo for this story rather than the Digital logo =)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Do I sound like a fanatic? I don't sound like a fanatic do I? No... I'm no fanatic... UhUh... no way. Gimme an Alpha, maybe a dual Alpha then you'll see a fanatic! :)
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
If someone wants to organise a Credit Union or a power purchasing consortium then I'll buy stock in that.
I got my $100 bucks right here. (pats back pocket)
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
How about this:
SCU (for lack of a better name) purchases 5000 of these CPUs, with motherboard, sells them for a profit, and gives the profit to suitable open-source organizations such as Debian, the FSF, or SPI(add organizations to taste) while retaining the wholesale cost of the processor (to break even on the whole deal).
Basic breakdown: Buy hardware, sell at a profit, give profit to (eg) Debian, keep wholesale costs so the purchasing organization breaks even. Think this would be workable? Any comments from financial/business types out there?
Posted by wvdputte:
This is great news... I was just looking to buy a new AXP motherboard.
Right now I was thinking of buying the 164 UX board with 2 or 4 MB of RAM. The board has onboard SCSI and 100 Mbit Ethernet.
You can get more info on this board at
http://www.quant-x.com/Alpha/frm3ATXUX.htm
Right now the cheapest prices I found in Europe
are:
UX Board 2 MB : 1299 DM
533 MHz CPU : 399 DM
128 MB ECC RAM: 345 DM
You need to add another 16% VAT to those prices
in $ US with tax included, that is something like
UX Board 2 MB : $930
533 MHz CPU : $286
128 MB ECC RAM: $248
Once the 800 MHz CPU's become cheap, one could upgrade.
My obvious question:
1. Has anybody seen better offers? Where would you buy your AXP stuff?
2. If a bunch of people in Europe could get together, would we get better prices?
Posted by Satyr:
I'd also like a piece of it.
Posted by SmashPHASE:
I may be wrong but if I interpreted this summary of the KP21264 on the Samsung site right,
quote:
"- Industry open standard socket - AMD K7 chipset support and
Slot A interchageability on the same motherboard "
( http://www.samsung.com/news/1998/ssi0406b.html )
The KP21264 will support the chipsets used for the
AMD K7. Since this CPU and it's supporting MBs will go into mass production shortly, I think the prices of MB capable of running Alpha procs wil drop considerably...
Of course the geeks want hetrogenious processing systems. It is cool. Talk to your mac buddy about the ppc in your computer, then the pc bigot about the k7, and then the real geeks about the true power of the alpha, without losing x86 or ppc compatability.
usefull is a different story, they don't care. If the hardware will support two different chips, I'm sure linux will gain support.
Also, they all come with 1MB of backside cache! Who want to build CHRP compatible machines with me!?
...oh well. Someday I'll fulfill my dream of PowerPC desktop world domination. Duopolies are better than monopolies.
It's far easier to forgive your enemy after you get even with him.
212 is much faster at the same MHz as 211 ... from the benchmarks I saw a 500MHz 212 would outperform a 211 running at 1GHz
Erm, I'd almost wager that the 400MHz Celeron is slower than your 333MHz PPC. Clock speed is only one of several factors that determine the speed of a machine
--
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
My ancient 21066A, rated at 233, does 266 nicely. I've run it at 300, but it needs a fan at that rate.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
--
no text.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Looks like Alpha really has a chance to dominate if it can get a foothold before Merced. A lower price and mainstream availability (Compaq could do this) would really help. As far as competing 64-bit architectures go, look at this poll to see by how much the Alpha platform is dominating industry opinion. How to leverage that into a real thrust against Intel? I think price will be a big part of it.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if these lower prices weren't part of a larger strategy by all Alpha licensees. It's now or never - let's see if everyone comes down, at least on the slower Alphas.
--
The real Paul Vallee is slashdot userid 2192, and, what do you mean it's not cool to point out your low userid?
Not to mention the fact that apparently most of the people who visited in the last couple days voted Alpha - mind you that's not surprising, 'cause it's an alpha-related story. Fact remains that these web-surveys, whether /., ontopofIT or CNN, are all very unscientific, no matter what the sample size.
--
The real Paul Vallee is slashdot userid 2192, and, what do you mean it's not cool to point out your low userid?
The K7 is supposed to (a) support SMP and (b) be electrically-compatble with the Alpha. Someone fill me in here -- what is the possibility that the K7 SMP design will be sufficiently compatible with the Alpha (maybe the same design?) that a heterogeneous multiprocessing system might be possible. Of course, this assumes the right basic hardware exists, like an SMP-compatible passive backplane system with daughterboards for the respective processors...
I think not...(*poof*)
Right-o. Your typical geek isn't going to use/need/want this. But for applications needing emulation, having the native processor present is of tremendous help. For example, the application I'm thinking of is an Alpha-primary system (boots to Linux for Alpha) with a K7-secondary processor used to support non-portable 32-bit x86 apps and WINE calls. Not TOO much work in patching WINE to look for the right processor, although other individual apps would be right bastards. There's also something to be said for optimizing ops for different processors when writing your own very-custom number-crunching code.
I wonder if anyone's done a patch to make WINE use the SunPC card (486) in SPARC Linux? Hum. Then again, noone else would put twin turbos in their Volvo either, but hey, that's just the way I am.
I think not...(*poof*)
Actually, is there a law against minting your own currency?
I'll give you 35 Slashdollars for that there Alpha.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
And motherboards? Can I buy single PPC motherboards?
I have 100 Slashdollars right here [pats back pocket]
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
www.kryotech.com
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Yes, generally you can count on up to 10% fairly safely, as long as you provide the power and airflow. Typically 533 are very happy at 600MHz.
Remember, they aren't really _different_ chips, they make a batch, and select out the better ones through testing..
Keep em cool and they run happy..
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
I just voted for MIPS...
;-)
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
And if the 21264 and the AMD K7 really are slot A interchangeable, we should finally have inexpensive motherboards into which to plug our inexpensive Alpha chips.
I want a 21264, and I want it NOW! If not sooner!
With any luck, when the AMD K7 comes out on the ev6 bus at least some cheaper low end motherboards will appear.
I'm running a Microway Alpha Screamer as a web
server. This is the current base box. It's
faster than my 300 Mhz.K6 Desktop but, in most things, not much faster with RH 5.1. Byte bench
marks are less in some areas. For this to be a
big deal, more optimization and tuned apps would
help a lot. Neither box uses the proprietary slot1
architecture, however, so I do gain satisfaction.
Attn. Compaq! we want the hotter stuff cheaper.
The slot protocol will be identical. Whether the CPU is 64 or 32 bit doesn't matter at all (as that's completely internal to the CPU). As for the data path... the protocol will be identical. So probably the K7 will also have 128bit data bus, or the EV7 protocol will make 128bit optional and work with 64bit data.
But you would have to change the BIOS for switching CPUs, I expect.
There are 21264 benchmarks for systems between 500 and 575MHz floating around; a dual 21264/500 board costs about $9000 at the moment, with the targetted market being embedded controllers which need that sort of performance.
Digital are very good at doing extremely aggressive speed-binning; they have 616, 625, 633 and even the occasional 666MHz 21164 running in very high-end systems, and they can produce 600MHz chips in large enough quantities that SGI can build 1024-way multi-processing T3E/1200 boxes.
The 21264 is not a small nor a simple chip; 64k data, 64k instruction caches already take up an awful lot of transistors. It has 15.2 million transistors, and is huge (300mm^2) in the 0.35u process. It bears about the same relation to the 21164 as the PPro does to the Pentium - much cleverer scheduling, much cleverer renaming, out-of-order execution, and all the other techniques required to get great performance out of an architecture.
Since it has a reasonable number of registers, and a sane FP design, it's about 50% faster on integer work and 2x as fast on FP work as a P3 of the same clock speed.
And it's been wildly delayed; the announcement I have with details in it was produced on 25/10/1996, and said 'samples first quarter 1997, volume second half 1997'; Digital representatives were promising volume production of 21264 systems by October 1997. If it had come out then, Intel would be in considerable trouble.
Bullcrap. Alphas have a PCI BUS, use ATX power supplies, and can use generic PC hardware. Other than the motherboard, the cost of an alpha system and an intel system (with the same components) is the same. Becase, well...they're the same components.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Thanks to Samsung, there are now cheap Alphas in quantity. However, just make sure it's not a 21164PC; these buggers don't have the L2 cache in the package, which is what helps the Alpha haul ass. (can you say Celloweron?)
I'm looking forward to the 21264 (and up) which will have SMP connectivity built in.
If there is a law agianst it, than its and USA one. Up here, Canadian Tire (a hardware/everything store), a national chain gives away Canadian Tire money, something like 1% of purchases, and takes it back at par.
Its printed on the same stock as Canadian currency (less holograms we have on 20's and up) at the same mint, a crown (ie government run sort of for-profit) corperation.
Thanks for the info.
I didn't see a price sheet on the site. You may have to write them directly in order to get pricing information (I know that that's the case with Compaq's alpha pages).
How they managed to pull 600 MHz at 0.35 without overheating is beyond me. I'm assuming that that's with a dual-phase clock. I'm also assuming that they can do a significant amount of work in one clock cycle. Does anyone have more information on the transistor technology used for various parts of the chip (i.e. CMOS, BiCMOS, ECL), and on the 21164 instruction set with clocks-to-execute information?
Why they're fabricating at 0.28 is a mystery to me, as most fabs can run at 0.25 now.
If they can pull 750 MHz at 0.28, then the 21264 should reach 1.2-1.4 GHz on 0.18 by late 1H-00 or so.
Re. clock speed, this will always influence performance. However, I agree that making sure that memory and peripherals can keep up with the processor is important too.
I know there are a lot of Alpha people out there reading, so I'll ask an off-topic question.
Does anyone have a web browser other than lynx running on their Alpha under Linux?
I've finally got X running on my AS 200 and now I don't even know what to do with it. I've been using the machine as a web server and to play with Samba. I'd sure like to be able to surf the web with it. I'm the hacker equivalent of a *script-kiddie* when it comes to programming, so I'm looking for compiled binaries that are known to work. Help, anyone?
Count me in on a buyers group! Imagine that.. the slashdot buyers group. Like cars, but with hardware. We pull together, buy, and sell it. Rob takes it to IPO, and we all get shares.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Unfortunately, Motherboards and cache for alpha are very expensive. I'm paying $1810 for a 600 MHz alpha w/4 MB cache on a UX motherboard. Cheaper than the alternative alpha not from samsung would be, though. Long Live Alpha! Everyone write portable code! :-)
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
From what I hear, Alpha chips were designed to handle emulation seamlessly by loading 100% of the emulated CPU's register set into the chip itself. All that has to be done is a few redirects to the soft set, and bingo, you have an emulated CPU at MAYBE a 15% performance penalty. Not bad, considering the Alpha is at least 4 times faster than existing Pentium II/Xeon processors at comparable clock rates.
BTW - FX32 isn't a Windows emulation system. It only emulates the Intel processor core. NT itself does all of the software work.