[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/2/2012 12:35 AM, David Froble wrote:
> When it was being competitively developed, nothing was faster than Alpha.
>
> As has been mentioned elsewhere, some people will pay for performance.
>
> To get to your question, you need to ask, "why was it fast?" Perhaps
> because the design was better than the competition? If so, and if there
> has not been any new designs that might be better, then a competitively
> developed Alpha might still be the fastest single processor available.
> When talking multiple cores, the "glue" on the chip, memory controllers,
> interprocessor communications, and such in EV7 and EV7z, even with the
> larger die size was doing things that out performed competing CPUs that
> had continued development and smaller die size.
>
> So, if the Alpha could be successfully shrunk down to say 35 nm, or even
> 22 nm which Intel has just released, and with a large on chip cache as
> the IA-64 has, perhaps it might still out-perform anything else available.
>
> Now, that is a mighty big "if", and what it would cost I have no idea,
> other than it wouldn't be cheap. So, commercially, might it be viable? I
> really have no idea. It would depend upon how many might pay for such
> performance.

A shrink to current technology could make it run at 3-4 GHz.

Or about 3-5 times faster than back then.

That is not enough.

But modify it from 1 to 8 cores per socket.

Then it will be 24-40 times faster than back then
(for multi thread/process usage).

It is starting to look like something.

Double all 3 levels of cache and do some optimizations
based on what is learned since then to double performance.

Then it will be 48-80 times faster than back then.

But the first item require a B$ investment in production
facility.

And the two last items require significant design work that
will take a lot of time (years).

Arne