Author: Vincent Lejeune
Date: 17:07:03 03/12/00
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On March 12, 2000 at 18:01:28, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On March 12, 2000 at 17:03:53, Tom Kerrigan wrote: > >>On March 11, 2000 at 09:01:19, Vincent Lejeune wrote: >> >>>>EV6 is both good and bad. Good for performance. bad for price. it is a 256 >>>>bit bus. Which is not cheap, from a memory point of view... >>>> >>>>Supposedly the athlon is pin-compatible with an alpha, at least that was the >>>>original promise, so the el-cheapo machine could be built based on the athlon, >>>>but when performance was needed, the athlon could be replaced with a real >>>>21264 (or higher) alpha chip to really go fast. >>> >>>The athlon is pin-compatible as promised but it is "not electrically compatible" >>>with the alpha processors , as it was said since the biginning of the >>>developpement of the Athlon. According this, there's NO motherboard where could >>>plug an athlon or a alpha, and I bet there will be not one, because the 2 >>>products don't target the same users : Ahtlon for home/office automation and >>>Alpha for workstations/research computers/university >> >>I was pretty sure that pin-compatible meant electrically compatible. Otherwise >>AMD wouldn't make such a big deal about having processors that are >>pin-compatible with Intel. The whole deal with the AMD 486, K5, etc. was that >>they could be dropped into Intel mobos. >> >>I was also pretty sure that one of the reasons why the Athlon uses the EV6 bus >>is to make EV6 hardware cheap, so Alpha systems would become cheaper, and people >>would buy lots of Alphas to upgrade their Athlons... >> >>-Tom > > >That was my original thought/hope when I first saw the AMD announcement on >EV6 compatibility. I can't imagine a cpu chip that is compatible with the EV6 >but which won't replace an alpha or vice-versa... IE both plug into the same >socket, interface with the same bus. Would seem (to me) that they would both >be compatible replacements for each other...??? I've read the opposite in an article about the Athlon : The Athlon is "not electrically compatible" with the alpha processors ! Now, more investigation will confirm or annul this statement ... I've no time to invest in this search but if someone could, he would bring the truth Thanks in advance ;)
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