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To: FJB who wrote (28000)	7/7/1998 8:03:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Respond to of 33344

What's the difference between a superpipelined Alpha and a superpipelined K6? Bob, The difference is the depth of the pipeline. The fundamental speedpath for all processors tends to be access to the L1 cache. Alpha uses a three stage cache access- 1) address calculation 2) address translate 3) cache lookup. I believe that K6 (and most other processors) do the address translate and cache lookup in one cycle. My guess is that the principle clock speed advantage of Alpha is due to this one extra pipe stage. Given the importance of clock speed in the marketplace, it is somewhat baffling why other CPU vendors have not adopted this same approach. Scumbria