[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[Michael Kraemer]

Jan-Erik Soderholm schrieb:

> 
> About geometry shrinks. Not that it realy matters, but... :-)
> 
> I just checked these two pages :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium
> 
> It's interesting to compare the last Alpha (EV7z) and the
> current Itanium (Tukwila).
> 
> The EV7z was released in 2004, used 180 nm and runs at 1.3 GHz.
> Tukwila was released 2010, uses 65 nm and runs at 1.33-1.73 GHz.
> Pulson (next year?) will use 32 nm.
> 
> EV8 was ment to use 125 nm and run at 2 GHz.
> 
> How would a EV7z/8 shrinked from 180/125 nm to 65 or 32 nm performed ?
> And with 24 Mb on-die cache (as Tukwila) instead of 1.75 (3 for EV8) ?
> 
> The highest clock speed for an 180 nm Itanium (McKinley) was 1.0 GHz.
> 
> Ah well... :-)
> 

Whatever technical merits can be brought to the table,
they don't answer the question whether the world
needs yet another competing CPU design.
I think the history of both latecomers, Alpha and Itanic,
shows that there's not much commercial room
beyond x86 and the classical RISCs.
Iirc the last successfull introduction of a new architecture
was IBM's Power, this was more than 20 years ago.