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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (56391)	4/26/1999 12:44:00 PM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570498

Rob, what's your opinion of Intel's desire to apply SHV (standard high-volume) dynamics to the server and high-end workstation market, including Merced? How is Compaq/Digital going to respond, even as they themselves get ready to sell Merced systems of their own? Good question. I have thought (and still think) the EV68 part is the make or break part for Alpha. At .18 micron and copper based, the EV68 will outperform Merced (can't believe all the hype at The Register, they mention 1400 GHz silicon but that may be a ways out) Samsung is stating they can get .18 silicon to 1100 GHz. This part will be the low-end part PRIOR to Merced. It should be volume shipping around the first of the year. A hint was dropped my way that it contains larger L1, I know few of the details ... little is publically known about the .18 EV68. I suspect it should be a fairly cheap part as many will be squeezed on to a die. So $3500-$5000 EV68 hardware shouldn't be that uncommon. The neat thing here is Compaq/Samsung has plenty of time to come up with EV68 pricing as they will know Merced sample prices, etc. Regarding high-end ... this is why Microsoft is on board and why Merced appears quite cloudy now. Shoot, Intel has been selling McKinley futures as if Merced doesn't exist. If you look at the 21364(EV7 gets little press) and compare what we know of Merced... A very good analysis of Merced bandwidth was done in one of the Usenet groups. The conclusion was Merced does 2.1 to 2.6 Gigabytes/second CPU <-> Main Memory. These are 21264 bandwidth numbers. Outstanding numbers for 1998/1999. However, the 21364 does 6 Gig/sec memory bandwidth: digital.com Plus the 21364 has a network controller on the chip in addition to IO allowing systems that look like this: digital.com Keeping system and memory routing down.. in other words, several paths to ship bandwidth around. CPU to CPU being the latest and greatest path.. 10 Gig/sec CPU to CPU: digital.com But probably just as exciting are WildFire and 21364 cost.. the 21364 has a 21264 core.. with 1.5 MByte L1 ... since logic is the more expensive cells.. this baby is a nice price too. WildFire system: theregister.co.uk Compaq is talking about this as an "affordable" system. Easily rendering 8400 obsolete and much more scalable. That said, the 21364 will easily outperform Merced in the server space especially for anything bandwidth or I/O intensive. Compaq shipping Merced servers? Sure.. a "me-too" offering .. but it will be clear that it is a "me-tooer". Merced is no where near 21364 from what little we know about Merced. At least we have a good feel for Merced memory bandwidth, 21364 bandwidth shows up in McKinley.