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- Path: sparky!uunet!pageworks.com!world!ksr!jfw
- From: jfw@ksr.com (John F. Woods)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
- Subject: Re: Is DEC history???
- Message-ID: <14218@ksr.com>
- Date: 28 Jul 92 10:36:48 EDT
- References: <67830008@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com> <lkingsley-240792091844@lkingsley.crd.ge.com> <1992Jul27.201600.28245@bcrka451.bnr.ca> <1992Jul28.024434.1@vax1.umkc.edu>
- Sender: news@ksr.com
- Lines: 22
-
- tmaehl@vax1.umkc.edu writes:
- >One big problem Alpha has is heat dissipation and power
- >consumption. The first implementation dissipates 30+ Watts.
- >If you can get your hands on this weeks Digital News, take
- >a look at the *giant* heat sink in the corner of the board.
- >Can you imagine this power hog in a portable or handheld?
-
- Presumably, that chip (which is not "Alpha", since that names an architecture
- :-) won't go in portables or handhelds. If they feel the need to consume the
- portable and/or handheld market, they can scale the power usage down (possibly
- by cutting down on the computational power, but how many people mourn that
- their notebook computer is slower than a Cray?).
-
- >On the other hand, it apparently scales through multiple
- >processor implementations nicecly (where the balance of
- >1-1000 performance gain is suppose to come).
-
- That's only where part of the performance gain is to come from; according to
- the recent IEEE Spectrum article, they plan to increase the clock rate, the
- number of instruction issues per instruction cycle, and the number of
- processors, all to achieve that x1000 boost over the lifetime of the
- architecture.
-