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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: grok who wrote (51748)3/6/1999 3:28:00 AM
From: Ali Chen  Read Replies (1) of 1572724
 
<Alpha is said by its designers to be short tick because it has an extremely high clock rate but doesn't do a whole lot in a cycle. It also has a long pipeline.>
Nice introduction, but everything is backwards.
Alpha has a long pipeline because they WANT every stage
to be "short tick". To make the tick "short", they had to
reduce amount of sequential gates in stage logic,
and therefore they can't do "a whole lot" in a cycle,
as you correctly noticed. As a result, the pipeline
must have more stages to execute same instructions.
But because the number of sequential gates in stages
is strictly limited by design, the stage propagation
time is short, and that is why the frequency is high.
This is called a "superpipelined" design. It was invented
by DEC and apparently stolen by Intel.

As it follows from AMD optimization guide, K6 executes
most instructions in just 4 stages. Now compare this
with 12-14 stages in Pentium-II/Pro, and you may arrive
to a conclusion that the stage complexity in K6 must be
much higher, not to say 3 times, but around that.
However, the overall K6 frequency is just 20% below
Pentiums. Now draw your own conclusion about who makes
better FETs. Only idiots from Intel Supremacy Klan with
"make is so Phd" cannot see this "tiny architecture
thing" and blatantly try to compare incomparable things.

Take care,
- Ali
<end of the lecture>
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