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To: Aaron Cooperband who wrote (46946)	2/2/1998 5:29:00 PM
From: Jules V	Respond to of 186894

Aaron, <<< Re: "It seems that Sun will be the only holdout, the one company standing between Wintel and the notion of cross-platform computing." >>> This article says Digital alpha possibly could still be (even if barely) alive. But Alpha will have to contend with intel has 8 way SMP Merced in the works. Digital has impressive sounding architecture according to the second article below. I expect someone here like Paul could shed more light on intel competing with the above, assuming compaq doesn't scotch digital on the rocks. Digital Attacks -- And Compaq Adopts -- Intel's Merced techweb.com Intel/Compaq: Emphasizing its commitment to just such a path, Intel last month quietly acquired the 60-person NCR design team that had developed the Octascale technology for eight-way SMP Pentium Pro systems. According to several sources, the Columbia, S.C., group has already started work on an eight-way SMP system based on Merced. Last year, Intel acquired Corollary of Irvine, Calif., which is crafting ASICs for an eight-way system using a 450-MHz version of Intel's Deschutes processor, which is expected to ship later this year. Digital: "In the next 18 or 24 months, the 264 can go to 1 GHz and 100-SPECint," Kim said. Samsung is betting big it can tap a new market through Alpha. Beset by DRAM price drops and a faltering economy in South Korea, the company said it is hoping Alpha will lead the way to more logic sales to bolster semiconductor revenues. Samsung said it hopes to get an early lead over Intel's forthcoming Merced processor by offering Alpha chips with comparable or better performance than any X86 competitior. Kim said the decision by Advanced Micro Devices, in Sunnyvale, Calif., to use the Alpha EV6 bus for its next-generation K7 processor will provide OEMs with pin-compatible devices across the performance range. The result will be to make Alpha systems more affordable by taking advantage of lower-cost motherboards for the K7. "We want to provide the 21264 and the K7 as the new standard," Kim said. "There's opportunity to do joint marketing." Info on Digital architecture (and K7): byte.com While Socket 7 currently runs at 66 MHz and will soon step up to 100 MHz, EV-6 can run at a blazing 333 MHz. That's over three times faster than Socket 7 or Intel's P6 bus. And although EV-6 doesn't define a separate back-side bus for an L2 cache, designers are free to add one if they wish -- allowing more flexibility for different markets. For instance, Digital's high-end 21264 implements a 128-bit-wide back-side bus, twice as wide as Intel's. At 333 MHz, EV-6 has 2.6 GBps of raw bandwidth, more than three times as much as a Socket 7 or P6 bus at 100 MHz. That's an enormous advantage, because the prime factor limiting performance in modern CPUs is the time they take to access memory. A high-end system could exploit EV-6's extra bandwidth by hanging the memory on a 128-bit-wide bus on the chip set. That would double the amount of raw bandwidth to memory. Even if the memory is on a conventional 64-bit bus, EV-6's headroom should mean fewer stalls while the CPU refills its cache lines. The downside: EV-6 chip sets are more complicated to design, and chip sets for multiprocessor systems will be expensive, because they'll need at least 64 additional pins for each CPU. AMD is working with third-party vendors such as VIA to design EV-6 chip sets. For Digital, the big win is that future Alpha processors that have EV-6 and a Slot A cartridge will plug into the same motherboards as AMD's K7 processor. Only the BIOS needs to change. Since modern BIOSes use flash ROM, it's a quick software upgrade.