Good Morning John, Article...Digital attacks, Compaq adopts Intel's Merced...
February 3, 1998
Electronic Engineering Times via Individual Inc. : San Jose, Calif. - Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alpha group is preparing to come out with its answer to Intel's Merced at a time when Alpha's fate is clouded in the wake of Compaq Computer Corp.'s announced plan to acquire Digital. The company today is expected to detail significant new Alpha products, possibly including plans to take the processor to speeds of 1 GHz.
However, Compaq sketched out a road map last week that shows no role for RISC processors in its future high-end systems. The Houston PC maker separately disclosed that it is already working with a new design group at Intel Corp. to build servers based on Merced.
Digital (Maynard, Mass.) is expected to announce availability of its next- generation 0.35-micron 21264 processors running at 400 to 433 MHz, a device the company claims will provide twice the performance as the current 21164. To get such a performance boost, the chip will use out-of-order execution and double the size of the cache memory, with a bandwidth rating of 8 Gbytes per second. The L2 cache will run as fast as 5 Gbytes/s, according to Y. J. Kim, associate director of Alpha processor marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, here.
The devices, which will start selling in sample quantities in the second quarter, will top off at 600 MHz, Kim said. By the third quarter Samsung, the leading Alpha licensee, plans to shift the product line to its 0.25-micron process. That will drive processor speeds past 800 MHz. "In the next 18 or 24 months, the 264 can go to 1 GHz and 100 SPECint," Kim said.
Samsung is betting big that it can tap a new market through Alpha. Beset by DRAM price drops and a faltering economy in South Korea, the company is hoping Alpha will lead the way to more logic sales to bolster chip revenues. Samsung hopes to get an early lead over Intel's forthcoming Merced by offering Alpha chips with comparable or better performance.
Kim said the decision by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (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."
The Alpha push comes in the wake of Compaq's agreement to purchase Digital for an estimated $9.6 billion (see story, page 31). Following the merger announcement, Compaq detailed what it called its Enterprise 2000 platform in a London press conference. The platform amounts to a road map based on four- and eight-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) Pentium II and Merced systems working in tightly linked clusters or system-area networks.
Asked whether the company's high-end servers would be based exclusively on X86 CPUs, Mike Perez, vice president of the server products division, said, " Absolutely. Our play is to leverage high-volume building blocks, building a mainframe one brick at a time. For us, Merced is just a bigger, better node. "
Emphasizing its commitment to just such a path, Intel last month quietly acquired the 60-person NCR Corp. design team that 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 Corp. (Irvine, Calif.), which is crafting ASICs for an eight-way system using a 450-MHz version of Intel's Deschutes processor, due this year.
"Since product-development cycles for these kinds of systems are sometimes longer than the product cycles themselves, Intel had to break away to parallel development, just as they do with processor generations," said a source close to the design team. "The word is they are being pulled into the Corollary stuff awfully quickly."
Compaq, which is supplying 64-bit, 66-MHz PCI silicon in cooperation with the Corollary project, expects to strike a "similar agreement" to work with Intel's new Merced server team. "We are in the middle of that," Perez said.
He would not comment specifically on Compaq's plans for Alpha, but he did indicate that the MIPS architecture of the high-end systems of Tandem Computer (Cupertino, Calif.), which Compaq acquired last year, will ultimately make the transition to the X86. "The [Tandem] trajectory is to move to Intel and high- volume platforms, but they are committed to a couple more generations of the MIPS architecture," Perez said.
Indeed, Compaq's acquisition of Digital is being seen as a sign that high-end RISC/Unix servers are under assault from the PC architecture in the form of clusters of Merced-based SMP systems. The acquisition of the NCR design team "underscores Intel's seriousness about this part of the market," said Jim Pike, head of that group. Pike refused to comment on Intel's specific plans.
Last fall, Intel made a bid to buy Digital's chip operations except for the Alpha line, to which Digital would retain rights. Observers wondered aloud last week what impact the possible failure of that deal, still facing government scrutiny, might have on the Compaq/Digital merger. The deals, if approved, would appear to make the fast Alpha CPU something of a corporate orphan.
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Michael |
