The Register meldt dat Compaq een .PDFje op hun site heeft neer gemikt, waarin ze uitleggen hoeveel geweldiger de Alpha is vergeleken met Intel's Itanium / Merced. Op zich is het natuurlijk niet vreemd dat Compaq claimt dat hun Alphaatje sneller is dan de proc van de buurman, afgezien daarvan hebben ze wel een aantal interessante punten:
And, according to the Adobe PDF document entitled Alpha and IA64, which can be found here, any dreams of world domination Intel may have with such 64-bit architecture are just that, dreams.The document cites facts, figures and benchmarketing to demonstrate that pound for pound, the Alpha outperforms Intel architecture. One soundbyte says: "Alpha will be superior to IA64 in commercial applications".
Some of the material the Big Q has posted has been available before, but the important point with this document is that it is really a positioning statement. And it clearly shows Q is going to attempt, at least, to give Intel a run for its money. "IA64: a smart compiler and a dumb machine" gives a flavour of the piece. [break] En een stukje direkt uit dat .PDF document: [/break] An Alpha processor will exploit static and dynamic instruction-level parallelism with out-of-order execution, and thread-level parallelism with simultaneous multithreading. Out-of-order execution has a benefit of 1.5-2x over in-order execution. Simultaneous multithreading has a benefit of 1.5-3x over single threaded execution.
