From: nan@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (Nan Zou) Subject: Re: Intel, the Pentium and Linux Date: 24 Apr 1993 21:42:08 -0500
kenney@stein.u.washington.edu (Michael Kenney) writes:
>farrow@ucsu.Colorado.EDU (J. Scott Farrow) writes:
>>root@fab4box.wa.com (Art Taylor) writes:
>...
>>The latest PC Magazine says that the Alpha 21064 is "claimed" to be 15%
>>faster than the Pentium in integer operations, and 120% faster in floating
>>point ops. (April 27th, p 139). That's for a 150Mhz Alpha chip, and there are
>>faster versions available.
>>
>>Frankly, I wasn't impressed at all after reading the reviews on the Pentium.
>>Both DEC and MIPS/SGI have it beat with the 21064 and the R4000 chips.
>But how much do they cost? I'll bet the Pentium will be cheaper. What
If that's your bet then you'd probably lose. The Pentium costs around
$1000 in quantity, the Alpha costs about the same. R4000 chips are much
cheaper, ($400?). DEC plans to bring out cheap Alpha-based PCs running
Windows NT. Something similar is also happening to R4000 and R4400, in
fact a company named Acer America has already introduced PCs in the 3000
and 4000 range based on the R4000 and R4400 chips, but they have ISA bus
(stupid) and only runs Windows NT (even more stupid).
>about future upgrades? There are lots of factors to consider.
The Pentium is pretty much as far as you can push in the 80x86
architecture. It's also one prime example why CISC chips are at a dead
end against RISC chips, for millions of dollars in R&D, long develop-
ment cycle and twice the transistor count (3.1M vs. 1.6M), it still
can't touch the Alpha. The 80x86 architecture is severely limited to
begin with, any attempts to extent it will likely be difficult. The
Alpha is going quad-issue superscalar and have its speed raised to 400
Mhz next year. While at 66 MHz Intel is having major heat problems (you
probably won't see 66 MHz Pentium chips this year), the pipeling must be
hell to do with so few general purpose registers and unorthogonal
instruction set, if Intel was smart they'd start with a clean slate on
the Hexium (Sexium?), but knowing Intel this probably won't happen.
-- Nan