Re: Merced to suck(?)

Robert Harley (Robert.Harley@inria.fr)
Wed, 22 Oct 1997 15:42:14 +0200 (MET DST)


Greg Bolcer (gbolcer@gambetta.ics.uci.edu) wrote:
>I am underwhelmed by the Alphas, they can only manufacture
>at 750MHz,

Is that all? =:-)

> so while those are some good Spec95 numbers,
>what really impresses me is the 600MHz UltrasparcIII which
>sampled at SPECint95 of 35+ and SPECfp95 of 60+.

Sampled at? According to the Web page you mentioned "The
UltraSPARC-III microprocessor is expected to sample during the summer
of 1998."

>Now that's fast.

Now that's vapour. OTOH, the 21264 is being demoed running Unix, VMS
and Windoze. SPEC95 estimates are 44e int, 66e fp at 667 MHz.
If hype-meisters from Sun and Digital are to be believed, Digital will
be shipping 800MHz 21264 machines before UltraSparc-III samples.

Right now, the fastest Sparc I'm aware of is the 300Mhz one in
"Ultra 30" boxes doing 12.1/18.3. Sun announced them for $21495 in
July, just a few days after DEC Japan announced 433MHz Alphas doing
13.9/18.1 for $1550. That's the slowest Alpha "Personal Workstation"
that Digital sells.

Much as I like Sun, no Sparc has been fast for years. However if you
have tasks that parallelize well and money is no object, Sun does have
some nice multi-processors.

-- Rob.
.-. Robert.Harley@inria.fr .-.
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