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To: Ritz who wrote (27963)	7/6/1998 7:31:00 PM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 33344

Ritz, Alpha does not have to be able to execute the much more involved instructions of the X86 instruction set. This is what enables it to operate at higher clock frequencies. When comparing X86 processors to X86 processors, Yousef's comments hold true. There are differences between internal implementations of of various x86 designs. On applications other than Quake, P-II and K6 have similar performance at the same clock speed, but there clock speed has to be about 25% higher than Cyrix to reach the same performance as Cyrix chips. Joe

To: Ritz who wrote (27963)	7/6/1998 8:42:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 33344

Alpha does not have to be able to execute the much more involved instructions of the X86 instruction set. Ritz, Alpha achieved very high clock speeds by superpipelining, full custom logic, and very large drivers. All of those techniques are avaliable to x86 designers. x86 processors break up the complex instructions either in the decode stage (AMD, Intel, IDT) or in microcode (Cyrix.) x86 requires more work than a simpler architecture, but there is nothing inherent about the x86 architecture which requires lower clock speed. For example, PII runs at a higher clock speed than Power PC, Sparc or Mips. Scumbria