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1GHz Alphas

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the ain't-that-cool dept.

RelliK writes "news.com has a story about 1GHz Alphas demonstrated at PC Expo. They'll be available by mid-2000. In the mean time, they'll start shipping 750 MHz Alphas 21264 in July. " MMMmmm... alphariffic.

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. More interestingly... by Prothonotar · · Score: 4

    It's finaly (more or less) been confirmed that the 21264 Alphas and the K7s will be interchangeable. Now all we need are mobo's with BIOSes that can support both chips. And no ads in them either please!
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.

    --
    "Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
  2. We don't need no stinkin' wires... by dublin · · Score: 5
    So it looks like the Alpha will be the first microwave CPU on the market. How long until we just toss the wires and propagate the signals down a waveguide? :-)

    This is an interesting innovation - at those speeds, you can cook your food with the radiated RF energy, the dissipated heat, or both. Finally, a computer that's *really* an appliance!

    I can see it now, the new CPSC/FCC/DOE microwave PC warning label:

    WARNING - Do not remove this tag under penalty of law!
    (This isn't a matress or pillow, we mean it.)

    DANGER! Microwave Microprocessor Unit! Do not ever, ever open the case of this computer!

    RF Radiation Hazard inside. Opening this computer will let cancer-causing microwave
    frequency photons jump out and eat their way through your retinas on their way
    to your brain, where they may impair your judgement in selecting an operating system.

    • You've been warned.
    • Factory sealed for your protection.
    • This computer contains no user-servicable parts.
    • Like you could get it apart anyway, since Compaq uses these goofy screws...
    • Do NOT warm strawberry Pop-Tarts in the Zip disk drive slot.
    • Coffee cups on the CD-ROM drive "cup holder" may be heated, but drive
      must be closed when no coffee cup is present, or it's your retinas, baby.
    • Digital/Compaq is NOT responsible for funny little fractal patterns on your CD's.
    • Discontinue use if rash, irritation, redness, or swelling develops.
    • Do not use an apostrophe to indicate the plural form.
    Thank you.
    Legal Department, Digital Equipment Division of Compaq Computer Corporation, Houston, Texas.

    --
    "The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last ./ post
  3. Some thoughts/comparisons by ChrisRijk · · Score: 5
    Here's some current SPEC results
    Some high-end SPECint/SPECfp results:
    PA-RISC 8500 @ 440Mhz 34/51.4
    21264 Alpha @ 500Mhz 27.3/57.7

    Some notes: AMD's K7, even though it has a better FP unit than P-II will 'only' get SPECfp of about 20 at 600Mhz. (don't have published info, so making guess based on that it's about 30-40% faster than P-II). Sun's next gen chip (UltraSparc-III) will apparantly get SPECint/fp of 35+/60+ at 600Mhz (no actual results yet) - it is supposedly being publicly shown at the DAC (Design Automation Conference) now, but won't ship in volume until end of the year.

    Anyone know how much the 8500 costs? It has 1.5Mb of level 1 cache - it has 150M transistors, to the Alpha 21264's 'mere' 15M. It must cost loads... This cache probably skews the SPEC results quite considerably when comparing to 'real world' cases - the SPEC marks scale pretty well with cache size I've heard... I also see that the 8500 doesn't seem to scale at all well at SPECfp as you add extra processors, compared to the other chips.

    Real world usage can vary immensly from the SPEC values, depending on what you're doing. I have friends who've compared various machines for high end computations (fluid dynamics) and they found the SGIs ran/scaled the best, even though they didn't have the best SPECfp results for a single chip - it's their massive data buses that do the trick. Actually, the PA-RISC 8500 doesn't have a complete Fortran compiler yet... Most people I know consider the Alpha to be let down by it's IO/bus data-rate,etc. Yes, it's better than PC, but it's not much compared to the other high-end RISC guys, especially SGI, though I expect this difference to change...

    A final note, a problem you get with high-speed processors is that they become nice little microwave transmittors (at 700-800+ Mhz, I think it was) and so you really need to reduce the power (the PA-RISC 8500 consumes 85W @ 440Mhz) and up the shielding when clocking at this rate, because otherwise you'd get a REAL pizza cooker/toaster in your computer...