Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 15:19:51 01/19/01
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On January 19, 2001 at 09:13:57, David Wilke wrote: >It has been stated by Robert many times that Crafty is blazing fast on an Alpha >processor. > >If this is the case, why wouldn't he use Alphas to run Crafty on the chess >servers instead of the big gun Xeons? > >What would be the actual cost of a Quad processor Alpha machine? > >And how much faster would Crafty be on that hardware? Recently (november) a dual mainboard came out for alpha at 866Mhz. Around 2500us$ ONLY for the motherboard. And correct me if i'm wrong, but it doesn't give a hardware 2.0 speedup. A cool MSI dual 694d motherboard allows processors (PIII fcpga) at like 1Ghz or above. It's $200 at most. So it's realistic to say alpha's are about 10 times pricier. A 16 processor alpha recently sold for 8.5 million dollar. I forgot the speed of the alpha's on that system. somewhere between 450 and 600 Mhz i think. Also it's not realistic to assume that we'll see alpha's in the stores breaking the 1 Ghz barrier in dual motherboards. If a dual alpha 21264 would be not too expensive i might just for fun buy one, but just $2500 for the motherboard to start with is not exactly big fun. That's out of my price range for sure. The 866Mhz speed i don't even complain about as it's not realistic to expect any production 64 bits machine with so many registers like the alpha has to get over 1 Ghz. It's more realistic to say that it might take 2 years before we see that. AMDs will be running probably dual then at 2 Ghz for less as 1/10 of alpha prices.
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