[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2011-07-04 09.22, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> 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.

Well, the Alpha was not really a latecomer. It's also about 20 years old 
now. And it was the first high speed CPU out there, as well as the first 
clean 64 bit CPU. It had a lot going for it. However, it was tied to a 
company that was sinking, which is a part of what made it fail.

	Johnny