[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[John Wallace]

On Apr 30, 7:45 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> 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.

"IA64 ... gargantual and excessive number of transistors probably
makes it very hard to get much lower power consumption."

Take away most of the XXXXL (24MB?) cache and IA64 chips would not
only use less power they would use less silicon too. But presumably
that might expose the underlying performance.

Intel's x86s aren't going to be able to do anything radical with power
consumption without losing compatibility with existing software (ie
Windows). Lose the need for Windows, and where's the big incentive to
use x86? Any consumer electronics or embedded system builder can
answer that one, and you can see their answers all around you (you've
got examples of their decisions in your home, in the car, in the
office, and in your pocket). You can also see the answer in some of
the more sensible datacentres.