<Gotta watch it. I suppose we all like to puff up a bit, but I believe your unfamiliarity with all the parts make it a little difficult on your end. What is the EV68? It is the .18 micron shrink of 21264. More than just a shrink.>
I'm not talking about just processors. Compaq can sell the processor at any price they want for the Alpha market. I'm talking about the whole platform. A 21364 isn't just a shrink of a 21264; it also incorporates four RDRAM controllers and a north bridge interface. That alone is going to increase the cost of the processor, while saving some chipset silicon. But a four-way 21364 system is still just as complex as a four-way Merced. I haven't seen anything that tells me that a 21364 system is going to be cheap to make.
<Today, you can pick up a decent Alpha with a 533 MHz 21164 (EV67, formerly known as the 21164A) for $1400>
Big deal. That price is not for a complete system, plus that price is for the (relatively) weak 21164. And that price is only for a processor, case, motherboard, and floppy drive. I can get a comparable Pentium III 500 MHz processor, case, motherboard, and floppy for $800, and integer-wise it should perform just as fast as the Alpha which you quoted. Entry-level single-processor systems are always going to be priced this low.
You might want to look at the dual-processor 264DP series on the same web page that you linked. That one features all the basics and goes for $11,195 for one processor, plus a second processor for $3,795 extra. (Let's not even mention the 128MB SDRAM and 4 GB hard drive; my PC at home has that much.) I can find dual Pentium III Xeon workstations from Dell for much less. Of course, the dual Xeons won't perform as well as two 21264's, but today's Xeon pricing scheme is most likely going to be tomorrow's Merced pricing scheme, so I'd be careful to compare apples-to-apples here. Of course, by the time Merced is released, this 264DP workstation will be old news, but by then, a dual 21264 workstation running at 800-1000 MHz is probably going to go for at least $16,000 with two processors. That's a price point that Merced can fit comfortably in.
I hope you understand where my point-of-view is. Pointing to an el-cheapo 21164 skeleton and saying that this will be the pricing point for the 21364 at the time of its release is an invalid comparison.
Tenchusatsu |
