Author: Dan Homan
Date: 11:54:40 06/03/98
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On June 03, 1998 at 13:18:11, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >>And what a wonderful chip it is. It just blows away any pentium. > >Isn't "blows away" a little inappropriate? > >I mean, it isn't even 50% faster according to SPECint. I don't think it >qualifies for "blows away" status. True for integer performance of the currently available Alphas on 32 bit programs (64 bit programs should get a significant boost), but check out the floating point performance important to us physics types. The new ones (out now, but will be in machines in Q3) are about 3 times the speed of a 400 MHz PII in integer performance. They will be much better than this for 64 bit programs. The Digital home page claims that they will hit SPECint95 scores greater than 100 by the year 2000. Digital seems to have been consistently a year or so ahead of intel in integer performance and light years ahead in float point performance. (Of course, buisness applications and chess programs only care about integer performance for the most part.) > >Bob, I don't know why you think the chip is wildly popular. Remember >when DEC took out an entire page of the NY Times to announce that >they've sold 10,000 Alphas? Intel sells a thousand TIMES as many >processors in a single year. The Alpha isn't even popular when compared >to Intel clone chips. > >Cheers, >Tom Depends on your definition of popular. In terms of unit solds, you are quite right. But I don't think the Alpha is designed to be a mass market chip. The Alpha is very popular in scientific computing, for example. I am typing at an old (1992-3?) 175 MHz Alpha right now. For the purposes of my chess program, it is about P133 speed, but on floating point performance it is still very speedy. (Part of the performance is due to the workstation architechure which helps with the huge amounts of data I pipe around.) I would love to see what a new one could do! - Dan
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