Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 15:36:44 09/03/01
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On September 03, 2001 at 12:06:26, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >On September 02, 2001 at 17:26:31, Tom Kerrigan wrote: > >>On September 01, 2001 at 08:40:46, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >[snip] > >>>completely (especially price range), as well from the >>>servers from alpha and especially from SUN and all other cpu >>>brands when running 32 bits (computerchess) software, >> >>Seems like lots of computer chess programs are 64 bit now, and the Alpha can >>more than hold its own against any PC processor running either 32 or 64 bit >>code. > >This is what i mean, an alpha 2 processor is around $20000 in the >store now. that's for a 833Mhz dual alpha. In the post I was replying to, it sounded like you were referring to Intels and possibly 64-bit CPUs in general. You didn't say anything about an 833MHz dual Alpha specifically. Who cares what the price of a dual 833 is? Was that ever in question? >A dual 1.2Ghz K7 of course blows that away for DIEP. > >An alpha 633Mhz (21164) used to be for diep around the same >speed like a PII at 380Mhz. The 21164 sucked at any code that wasn't purely 64-bit. If you had reworked your program to remove these bottlenecks, it would have been much faster. Nobody cares about the 21164 anymore anyway. >21264 has about the same number of registers as a K7, Huh? I hope you're talking about rename registers or something, because there's a factor of 4 difference in programmer visible registers (in the Alpha's favor). >and the 21264 has huge costs for branch mispredictions. What?? The 21264's pipeline is 7 stages. The Athlon's is 10. That means the Alpha has a much smaller penalty for a mispredicted branch. Moreover, it's widely accepted that the Alpha's BPU is better than the Athlon's. (The Athlon's BPU is a pretty sore point--AMD fans have been hoping for a redesign for years.) >The 4 instructions a clock it sometimes can do hardly make up >for the lack of 400Mhz in speed. The maximum number of instructions a chip can retire per clock doesn't have anything to do with anything. The Athlon can retire 6 (or 8? counting FP) per clock but that doesn't make it faster. Maybe if you took some classes in computer architecture or at least read a few hardware web sites, you wouldn't have to subject everybody to your seemingly endless supply of misinformation. -Tom
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