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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (119613)	7/7/2000 9:48:05 AM
From: minnow68	Respond to of 1579194

Joe, People would use Alpha MBs with Athlons if possible for performance reasons. For example, the UP2000 (http://www.microway.com/specs/up2000.html) has a 256 bit wide path to main memory with 2.65 GB/s of peak bandwidth. There are some applications where people would gladly pay the thousands the MB costs to get that memory performance. The problem is that the 21264 uses "Slot B", not "Slot A". If you search the web, one can easily find older documents showing that AMD and DEC intended that common MBs would be made. But clearly this never happened. I believe the reason is cost. Alpha systems are generally very expensive. Those buyers want very high performance and are willing to pay for it (hence the $2000+ price tag for the UP2000 MB). The vast majority of people buying PCs simply will not pay that much. Therefore, I believe that AMD dropped some of the super high cost/performance stuff from the Athlon design. Thus we have "Slot A" and "Slot B". I believe that Athlons could use the Alpha MBs if AMD produced a "Slot B" version of the Athlon. Performance would be incredible (as much as five times higher on some things!), but I'm not sure AMD would ever sell enough to justify the effort. Mike