Cirrcular and Tench,
<Most of the content is technical stuff, like a peak memory bandwidth of 4.2 GB/sec ("twice what we expect of the
Merced bus" according to MPR), ECC on memory and system buses, DRAM chip-kill, error scrubbing, 2.1 GB/sec
of I/O bandwidth, and other goodies fit for a server. But the last paragraph sums up the benefits quite nicely>
Cirr.. you missed a bit on this one.. the 21264 has a peak
memory bandwidth of 5.2 GByte/second. The cross-bar
in their latest 4 processor (they being Compaq, makers of
the world's finest Xeon-based chipsets and motherboards)
does 5.2 GB/sec and they are claiming 3 GB/sec sustained
memory (of course it doesn't reach nearly this on STREAM).
Why peak at 5.2? Well, max L2 bandwidth is 5.2. Be rather
silly to feed it (if you could) 8 GB/sec wouldn't it? Where
would it go ???
So my guess is that Merced L2 does 4.2 GB/sec so
with later chipsets (hey, don't forget to fully populate
those simm slots during test, mark your calendars!!!) they
will hit 4.2 GB/sec memory bandwidth. Funny how Merced almost caught up to a 4 year-old 21264 design. I guess that isn't really fair as the Merced design is probably much older.
So what do you think for SpecFp95? Think it will do better
than a GS140 with 700 MHz 21264's? 67 SpecFp95. After
all, SpecFp is bandwidth sensitive and when 21264 was
getting fed at 2.1 Gigabytes/sec it was doing 52 or so.
Maybe Merced does 60 as it has more fp units but is in-order. Tough call. Bet it doesn't get anywhere near
70 SpecFp being fed at 2.1 GByte/sec though.
Any hope of Intel talking about Merced performance next
month at MPR? Will we learn how many transistors?
<OEMs will be able to deploy powerful Merced workstations and servers with little upfront
investment. We expect many system makers to take advantage of this opportunity, resulting in a plethora of
relatively inexpensive Merced boxes by the end of next year. >
Now wait a second... Linley "Merced" Gwennap (and I am
guessing he penned this) last year was quoted as saying
Merced workstations coming in around 7-9 thousand dollars.
Maybe that is inexpensive for Merced boxes compared to what
they cost this year but that isn't a cheap workstation.
Look for much higher performing Alpha 21264 workstations at .18 micron and greater than 1 GHz being plentiful in the 3-4 thousand price range.. well before Merced boxes. Since the Merced CPU with 2 MByte of cache may cost that, do you think a Merced workstation might be a bit higher than 4 grand?
Rob |
