[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[JF Mezei]

John Wallace wrote:

> 21064 started life at around 150W. Xeons have been up there too,
> although currently they're a little bit less. Then you need to add all
> the Northbridge/Southbridge or similar gubbins traditionally
> associated with an x86 CPU.

My Nehalem quadcore mahines consume roughly 150 watts when not too busy,
but this is the total system consumption at the plug. Goes up to about
220watts when busy.

Remember that Alpha was done before the days where reducing power/heat
was a priority. When Merced came out, the power consumption issue was
just beginning to be important to the market.  (remember that initial
IS64s had bad power consumption to unit of computation ratios).

Had EV7 work not be stretched and delayed over many years, it would have
come out before power consumtion was a big issue, and my guess is that
any shrinks and EV8 would have then dealt with it.

Note that a lot of the "design" issues for power have to do with
shutting down portions of the CPU not currently needed (such as extra
cores, turbo-boost etc).

When you are single core, there is less you can do to lower power
consumption.  However, in the case of IA64, its gargantual and excessive
number of transistors probably makes it very hard to get much lower
power consumption.

Had Digital and Alpha survived, I am pretty sure that they would have
lead the market with power efficient Alpha, especially once they would
have gone multi core.