[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

ChrisQ <meru at devnull.com> wrote:

(snip, someone wrote)
>> I don't know what feeds your pipe dreams,
>> but the Alpha never had a good track record in power efficiency.

(snip)
> Sounds like rewriting history ?. I ran alpha machines for a decade
> or more and don't remember them being any more power hungry than
> equivalent x86 machines of the time, though they were much, much
> faster.

The problem with the comparison is that the power requirements
of just about everything except the processor have gone down over
the years. In the PC/AT days, it was the disk drive that used
most of the power in the box. (At least relative to the processor.)

> With shrinks and improved process technology, i'm sure that Alpha
> would have been more than competitvve with current designs, just
> as ibm power is now for it's intended market.

It might take more than that, but should be possible.

Many now turn off functional units, such as floating point,
when they are not being used. 

> Wonder how fast the last of the microvaxen would have been with
> similar upgrades ?...

There were problems with VAX. The 512 byte page was already too
small just about when it came out. The very large number of different
instruction sizes, and the complication with decoding them, also
made it hard. (I believe somewhat worse than IA32.)

-- glen