Ernst Mayer:
> 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."
>
Okay, the confusion comes in from the fact that DEC used to own the 'design'
of the Alpha and now that has gone to Compaq. Samsung (and a few others,
Fujitsu?) licensed that design and are allowed to make some changes and have
the right to new designs produced by the owner of the design. It looks like
Samsung set up a sort of spinoff to hold their rights to the license of the
Compaq owned Alpha design. Clear? :)
> 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 :)
>
Yes, there was talk of the Alpha toaster. When the first gen chips used
40W, people talked about an Alpha SMP toaster oven. (some kind of pun along
the lines of the sun 'pizza box')
> 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.
>
Hopefully this will be my redeeming grace for this long and off topic
email--sorry all.
> 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.)
>
Yeah, true, but the 21164 is capable of over 5GB/s of L2 cache
bandwidth(maybe 8+ in the near future), so who needs MIPS any more. (sorry
Mr. Mashy)
Cheers,
David
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