Author: Andrew Slough
Date: 16:35:26 07/06/99
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On July 06, 1999 at 19:01:02, Zachariah Amela wrote: >One other posters referred me to an Alpha system when I asked about >multiprocessor machines. I also have a friend who swears by the Alpha because >he says it's integer crunchy is bar-none. > >So tell me about the Alpha? Alphas are high performance RISC processors designed by digital to have as lower clock cycle time (higher speed) as possible. Compaq recently showed a normally cooled 1000 Mhz Alpha processor whereas I think the fastest normally cooled x86 processor is K7 at 600Mhz. An Alpha should be quite a bit faster per-cycle than an Intel processor too - Alpha 21164 & 21264 are quad out of order issue 64-bit processors. Although P2/3 can issue 3 instructions per cycle, the registers are only dual ported, which in practice limits it to two. P2/K6/K7 are 32 bit processors, which make them slightly worse for programs that use bitboards. They also 32 64-bit general purpose registers compared to x86's paltry 4 32-bit. >I understand it will run Unix and NT. But what >makes it better? >What is the cost? I would think you would be talking about $2000-$3000 minimum. >How much horsepower are we talking? SpecInt95 Digital Alphaserver 6/575 (575Mhz) - 30.3 Intel Pentium III/500 (500Mhz) - 20.6 SpecFP95 Digital Alphaserver 6/575 - 47.7 Intel Pentium III/500 - 14.7 The floating point results are irrelevant for chess though... > What >type of system administration are we talking? Who here that has used/programmed >w/ one can tell me where it shines/doesn't shine? > >Danke schön!
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