David Willmore writes:
>
>> 2) Was it Intel that bought the Alpha rights? It might have been IBM but
>> was NOT Compac.
>
>2) Yes, it was Compaq. Intel bought foundry technology that is used on the
>StrongARM as well as the StrongARM archetecture itself.
Actually, things are tad more complicated than that. http://www.alphapowered.com/
says:
"Engineering design of the Alpha processor remains with Compaq Computer Corp."
...
"Alpha Processor, Inc. was formed in June 1998 by Samsung Electronics Company (SEC) as
an independent company dedicated to the marketing and technical support of the Alpha
microprocessor architecture."
"The new company assures Alpha's continuing success in the Windows NT market. As an
independent Alpha architecture licensee, API will engineer new derivatives to the Alpha
microprocessor by developing innovative high-end workstation and enterprise class
server
solutions for the marketplace. Compaq's commitment to build Alpha-based systems, and
Microsoft's plans to provide complete operating system and development support for
Alpha
at parity with any other microprocessor, provides a strong foundation for the company's
success."
With Samsung involved, perhaps we'll soon be seeing Alpha-powered microwave ovens?
I seem to recall a long-buried thread on this list about how long various processors
take to cook a Turkey...(screams of "Nooo! Not that again!" in the background :)
Thanks to David Willmore (not a turkey by any means), I've had a chance to try a soon-
to-be-released update of my Mersenne code on a 500MHz Alpha 21264s, and it's extremely
impressive - 0.18 seconds per iteration at FFT length 384K, fully three times faster
than on my 400MHz 21164.
My code benefits inordinately from good prefetching, and the 21264 is much better at
that than previous versions. The performance on the 21264 is in line with the MIPS
(0.30 seconds on 300 MHz R12000 at FFT length 384K), which means that the longstanding
(see e.g. the SPECFP95 numbers) factor-of-2 difference between the Alpha and MIPS
(when adjusted for the differing clock rates) seems to have been wiped out. No wonder
MIPS doesn't list any performance comparisons with 21264 in their R12000 processor
information sheets (http://www.sgi.com/octane/images/octane.pdf) - 21264 blows them
away, and costs less. (On the other hand, one can upgrade an R10000 to R12000 via
simple chip swap, which one cannot do with the various Alpha generations.)
-Ernst
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