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To: Rob Young who wrote (89779)	10/10/1999 10:48:00 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Rob, Your post on the article declaring "The Itanium processor is perhaps the most robust processor ever built. With Intel's billions of dollars of research and development funds pouring into its development, it will be virtually impossible for the Alpha processor to maintain any current lead for much longer." I agree that's quite a sweeping statement for this early in the game. Some other comments on your points: Maybe the guy is just getting started or has Sun confused with Compaq's Alpha. The UltraSparc III rolls at year-end but MPF just last week , Sun presented UltraSparc V aka "Millenium". Doesn't it sound impressive? You gotta love Sun's marketing. They really do try. Anyhow, if you look at the numbers that Sun is estimating (gee, how hard can this estimating stuff be? The reasons Sun sells a tremendous amount of Solaris servers from the $50K to over a million each range is because they have earned the reputation of best of breed in the Unix (Solaris) server space. If pressured, I don't think they'd claim it is because they have an individual microprocessor chip to surpass the best Compaq or Intel or IBM has. Why should they care, individual chip speed is only a part of what sells servers. Scalability, RAS, and software robustness, and probably most importantly, the fact that Unix is not going away are what have Sun flying high. "perhaps the most robust processor ever built" That's a silly statement. So it has some fancy error correcting built in at the hardware level. The 21364 will support lockstepping. A must if you are supporting a fault-tolerant OS for the Tandem folks i.e. NSK. You really can't get more robust than that. Will it add to the server cost? Shertainly. Let the marketing types fight that one out. Point is, you can't get more robust than lockstepping. I would hope that Compaq Alpha can well satisfy Tandem's robust processor requirements because Compaq owns Tandem. I agree that lockstepping is getting there for ultimate reliability, at least as far as can be achieved today. General comment: you sure do defend Alpha with a lot of vigor, almost, however, to the point of being overly defensive. Tony

To: Rob Young who wrote (89779)	10/10/1999 12:34:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Rob - Re: "The UltraSparc III rolls at year-end but MPF just last week , " Hey !!! Big BOB !!!! Where's your condemnation of SUN - the Ultrasparc III was due out in the summer of 1998 !!! They're 18 months LATE ! Paul

To: Rob Young who wrote (89779)	10/10/1999 5:10:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Rob, just to address a few points, <21364 aka Arana aka EV8. Just discussed at MPF. Tench mentions 100% greater integer than 21264. That must be 21264 at its peak as EV8 is projected to be 200 SpecInt95 , 300 SpecFp95.> I thought 21364 was EV7, not EV8. EV7 will integrate the RDRAM memory interface onto the chip. EV8 will introduce simultaneous multithreading. I don't recall what the schedules were, since I don't have my notes and my foils near me right now, but EV8 won't be out for quite a while. <Intel has yet to release performance numbers for Itanium/Merced.> The latest issue of MPF has a feature article on the Merced architecture. In the article, it says, "Intel claims a four-processor Merced system will outperform a four-way server with 1.1-GHz 21264 processors on transaction-processing benchmarks." It doesn't say who from Intel said this, and besides, it's not common practice for Intel to make such claims at this stage. But nevertheless, that claim is pretty amazing. (I don't recall hearing such a statement at the MPF conference, though.) <So pipeline length and as the IBM fella points out "EPIC isn't high clock friendly" (paraphrasing).> What do you think Marty Hopkins from IBM is going to say? It's his job to spread FUD. If EPIC isn't very accomodating to clock speeds, then what would his take be on the rumors that McKinley will have very high clock speeds? What if McKinley turns out to have higher clock speeds than IBM's own Power4? Tenchusatsu