The Register heeft heftige info over de de nieuwe generatie 21364 Alpha's. Over een release date wordt niet gesproken, maar als onderstaande specs waar zijn dan is dit zeker een indrukwekkend procje:
Sources said that Compaq and API are readying a 1.6GHz Alpha 21364 which will include a version of SIMD 3D instructions and support for Rambus without the latency penalties that seem to dog the x.86 platform.According to the reliable report, a 1.6 GHz 21364 using the EV7 platform, is likely to belt out 6.4 single precision Gflops. If true, that will beat Merced hands down in ultraparallel single precision floating point.
There are eight 16-bit Rambus channels that make up the 128 bits.
Such a beast would not run Windows but instead a version of real time Tru64 using current OpenGL for the platform.
The processor will have a 128-bit 800MHz Rambus channels, and according to the report, will load an entire 128-bit cache depth at the first transfer. That compares with Intel's i820 chipset which with one 16-bit Rambus channel needs four transfers to fill the first 64-bit cache word.
According to the source, the 21364 integrates CPU, level two cache, direct memory controller and a transputer-class multiprocessing connection of each processor to four others at 10 Gbytes/s interprocessor bandwidth, in addition to cache and memory bandwidth, plus a dedicated 3.2 Gbyte/s IO bandwidth per CPU on one processor.
