From: jerry@msi.com (Jerry Shekhel) Subject: Re: Intel, the Pentium and Linux Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1993 21:52:01 GMT
Nan Zou (nan@matt.ksu.ksu.edu) wrote:
:
: >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?).
:
In a year or so, Pentium will cost what the 486 costs now ($400?). The Alpha
is less likely to decrease in price as much. In any case, I agree that CPU
cost is pretty much irrelevant. I do believe, however, that Pentium will
win big in terms of total system cost, though.
:
: The Pentium is pretty much as far as you can push in the 80x86
: architecture.
:
Oh come on. Isn't that what they said about the 286, the 386, *and* the 486?
:
: 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.
:
Can't touch the Alpha? I'm not so sure. The slowest Alpha machine in
existence runs at what, 150MHz? I find the fact that a Pentium running
at 1/3 the MHz of the Alpha comes within 15% of its performance pretty
impressive. And Pentium machines will simply blow away Suns and other
workstations in terms of price/performance. Even 486 machines are about
as fast as SuperSPARCs, and yet I'm sure you're not so critical of that
architecture.
:
: The 80x86 architecture is severely limited to
: begin with, any attempts to extent it will likely be difficult.
:
Yeah, yeah. Intel bashers have been carrying this tune since the '70's,
yet Intel has managed to close the PC-workstation CPU performance gap
with that x86 architecture.
:
: 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.
:
[Watch as I steer this discussion back into the realm of this newsgroup :-)]
Hey, don't get me wrong -- I believe that the Alpha is an innovative
architecture, and will probably be more easily scalable than the x86.
Maybe I've just been turned off by the sh*tty system software that currently
runs on the Alpha and HP (and I doubt that NT will change my mind about that).
I don't want to sound like an evangelist, but IMHO, Linux simply wipes the
floor with both OSF/1 and HP-(S)UX, as well as almost everything else I've
worked with. SunOS/Solaris is the only OS that's in the same league as far
as I'm concerned. The thing is, I don't think any of this will change until
the hardware vendors stop thinking they can develop operating systems as
well. That's why my next machine will probably be a Pentium -- so that I
can keep running Linux/GNU/XFree86.
: -- Nan