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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Elmer who wrote (48814)2/7/1999 4:44:00 AM
From: Tenchusatsu  Read Replies (1) of 1580253
 
Elmer, that article is kind of confusing. I wish they threw in a "foil" or two. What exactly is running at 83 MHz? Each processor-to-chipset port? Chipset-to-SDRAM port?

The article did say that the chipset will be using a four-way interleaved scheme with memory modules, meaning that the memory card will have groups of four DIMM sockets which must be populated identically. All four DIMM sockets will work in parallel, thus looking like a single 256-bit wide SDRAM unit.

Therefore, I think that each DIMM will be running at 83 MHz. That makes sense if each 64-bit processor bus is running at 333 MHz. PC100 SDRAM will be required because of the 83 MHz speed. (Then why run the SDRAM at 83 MHz instead of 100 MHz? Because 83 MHz is an integral multiple of 333 MHz, which simplifies clocking issues.)

So I guess the EV6 processor bus can currently be pushed to 333 MHz. Very high performance, but like you said, Elmer, it's not going to be cheap. Also, notice that the chipset will compose of up to 11 components just to support dual processors! That's OK as long as your volumes are low and your prices and margins are high.

A server with dual-21264 CPU's will start at $19,000, but that price is for a configuration with no more memory (128 MB) and hard drive space (4 GB) than my own desktop system. Fully decked out systems can go for much more. Though $19,000 is a nice price for the fastest two-way server out there, I imagine that you can get yourself a similarly-configured four-way Xeon system at a similar price. And the four-way Xeon system is bound to beat the two-way Alpha thanks to brute-force parallel processing.

Tenchusatsu
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