|
|
|
 |
home | about | pictures | reference | trade | links |
...Alpha Family Leads in Performance, Gets New, Lower Pricing...
MAYNARD, Mass., July 8, 1996 -- Digital Equipment Corporation
strengthened its four-year claim to the world's fastest and highest-
performance microprocessors with today's announcement of 500MHz and
433MHz versions of its Alpha 21164 RISC microprocessor. With peak
execution rates of up to 2 BIPS, these top-performing chips push the
performance envelope for visual computing applications such as video
conferencing, 3-D modeling, video editing, multimedia authoring,
image rendering, and animation.
Performance of the new Alpha 21164-500MHz chip is estimated at
15.4 SPECint95 and 21.1 SPECfp95, making it the industry's highest-
performance RISC or CISC microprocessor for both integer and
floating point operations. The Alpha 21164-433MHz chip is estimated
to deliver 13.3 SPECint95 and 18.4 SPECfp95.
Superior Benchmark Results
The Alpha 21164 product family's superior performance enables
it to handle the tremendous workload in 3-D graphics and motion
video faster than competing platforms, including those with special
multimedia instructions, with CPU power to spare for other tasks.
In tests using a suite of 3-D image rendering benchmarks from
Softimage, a 366MHz Alpha XL PC performed, on average, 31 percent
faster than a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 Extreme workstation, and 72
percent faster than an Intergraph TDZ 300/GLZ system based on the
150MHz Pentium Pro chip.
"In those same tests, we expect a 500MHz Alpha system to run 75
percent faster than the SGI workstation and well over twice as fast
as the Intergraph TDZ 300 system," said William N. Johnson, vice
president of marketing at Digital Semiconductor, a Digital Equipment
Corporation business.
Industry Accolades for Alpha
"Digital's 500MHz Alpha 21164 should keep Alpha in the
performance lead, even as Intel rolls out its 0.28-micron process
for Pentium Pro in 1997," said MicroDesign Resources analyst Linley
Gwennap. "Alpha performance has increased by an impressive 70
percent since the Pentium Pro was announced last fall."
According to analyst Tim Sloane of the Aberdeen Group, "There
is an increasing trend for high-end graphics, imaging, and video
software vendors to port their applications to Windows NT and to
offer desktop implementations via the Internet. This trend presents
an excellent opportunity for Digital to position Alpha as the
price/performance benchmark in a new market segment for the
professional Windows desktop."
Glenn Campbell, Area 51 visual effects supervisor for the
futuristic television feature, "Space -- Above and Beyond," said,
"Alpha systems give us the best bang for the buck. I can buy five
Alphas and put five animators to work for the price of one Silicon
Graphics Indigo Extreme machine with software and licensing."
New Pricing for Alpha Chips
Alpha 21164 microprocessors are now available in the following range
of speeds and price points:
Processor Price (1,000 units)
| Alpha 21164-300MHz | $ 695 |
| Alpha 21164-366MHz | $ 950 |
| Alpha 21164-433MHz | $1,492 |
The above microprocessors are all available for shipment. The
500MHz chip is sampling now and will be available in September. In
addition, Alpha 21164 board products, featuring standard PC
components and form factors, are also available now.