The cheap alphas (on SX motherboards) also have much smaller 1MB
Bcache, vs 4MB on the higher-end Digital workstations. Plus the
21164PC alpha processors on the cheap mobos don't have the extra 96kB
secondary cache on-chip, unlike the full-blown 21164 or 21164A CPUs.
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert M. Hyatt [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 1998 6:49 AM
To: Jiann-Ming Su
Cc: Michael G Hart; Alan Cox; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Alpha verses Pentium II
On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, Jiann-Ming Su wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, Michael G Hart wrote:
>
> > I am under the impression that a 500 MHz Alpha is faster that a
500 MHz
> > Pentium II (If you could get a 500Mhz Pentium II). You would
happen to
> > know where I could find the spec marks for these two processors? I
am at a
> > critical juncture where I need to make a decision on whether I
will be
> > clustering Alpha's or Pentium II motherboards. I don't want to mix
the two
> > in our cluster. Basically If I looking at the price/performance
ration.
> >
>
> For floating point intensive calculations, that is true. My 533 SX
> alpha is not much faster than a P5-166 for every day stuff like
loading
> X, Netscape, etc. But, for numerical calculations in Matlab, it's
> easily faster than PII-233 I use at work, and the Matlab benchmarks
show
> it to be within the top two or three computers that Mathworks
benched.
>
This is a common note. I usually add that such "alphas" are really
"half-
alphas". IE the real alphas run with at least a 128bit wide bus, and
most
are now 256 bits wide, with a bus that is 2x the normal PC. Several
companies make "alphas" that are really PC's with an alpha processor,
which means you inherit a slow/narrow bus. IE for a comparison, I ran
on
three machines, a pentium pro/200mhz, a Polywell alpha/533mhz, and a
digital alpha (21164, nothing fancy like the 21264). With the pentium
pro
at 1.0, the polywell was 1.75 times faster, the digital alpha (500mhz)
was
3.1 times faster than the pentium pro...
IE a big difference can be found depending on which "alpha" you have
used...
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