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

To: Elmer who wrote (40341)	10/29/1998 6:40:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573792

Elmer, Elmer, Elmer, It (Alpha) may be the cleanest, but based on what is shipping today it is only a couple of percent ahead of Intel's Xeon in integer performance. Unfortunately there is a dearth of benchmark data available, but here are some projected benchmarks from: microway.com As you can see, the Alpha 21264 is expected to blow away any x86 implementation for integer or floating point. x86 is not even in the same league. System Speed SPECint95 SPECfp95 Microway Screamer 21264 700 MHz 40.0 60.0 Pentium II 333 MHz 12.8 9.25 Scumbria

To: Elmer who wrote (40341)	10/29/1998 8:06:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573792

Elmer, I have often wondered why the Alpha was so expensive. I expect the main cause is the dev and plant costs spread over such a small production base. Makes me wonder if they had tried the japanese method and headed for volume at low price would they have given Intel more of a run for their money? True it differs from x86, but the raw speed might have developed markets and programs for it had it been sold at the same price as Intels chips but faster. One of DEC's errors? or the only path they could follow? Bill