On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, Jiann-Ming Su wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, Michael G Hart wrote:
>
> > I am under the impression that a 500 MHz Alpha is faster that a 500 MHz
> > Pentium II (If you could get a 500Mhz Pentium II). You would happen to
> > know where I could find the spec marks for these two processors? I am at a
> > critical juncture where I need to make a decision on whether I will be
> > clustering Alpha's or Pentium II motherboards. I don't want to mix the two
> > in our cluster. Basically If I looking at the price/performance ration.
> >
>
> For floating point intensive calculations, that is true. My 533 SX
> alpha is not much faster than a P5-166 for every day stuff like loading
> X, Netscape, etc. But, for numerical calculations in Matlab, it's
> easily faster than PII-233 I use at work, and the Matlab benchmarks show
> it to be within the top two or three computers that Mathworks benched.
>
This is a common note. I usually add that such "alphas" are really "half-
alphas". IE the real alphas run with at least a 128bit wide bus, and most
are now 256 bits wide, with a bus that is 2x the normal PC. Several
companies make "alphas" that are really PC's with an alpha processor,
which means you inherit a slow/narrow bus. IE for a comparison, I ran on
three machines, a pentium pro/200mhz, a Polywell alpha/533mhz, and a
digital alpha (21164, nothing fancy like the 21264). With the pentium pro
at 1.0, the polywell was 1.75 times faster, the digital alpha (500mhz) was
3.1 times faster than the pentium pro...
IE a big difference can be found depending on which "alpha" you have
used...
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