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Future of Alpha chip revealed

Snakes alive! ProLiants sail and crawl on belly

Terry Shannon, editor of newsletter Shannon knows Compaq is delivering a presentation today at a user group meeting which reveals the future of the Alpha roadmap. Shannon is an analyst and journalist who has tracked Digital and latterly Compaq for years. He has kindly sent us a copy of the presentation he will make to DECUS today, and interesting reading it makes. He says that the Alpha 21264 EV6 delivers blistering speed and the EV67 will be available shortly. He thinks that it will clock at 700MHz for TurboLaser and 767MHz ins for WildFire, attaining an estimated 36Specint95 at 667MHz. By the end of the year, the EV68 will arrive at speeds of around 833MHz, and possibly 1GHz by year end. According to Shannon, the 21364 EV7 Alpha will use the EV6 core plus on-die level two cache and support logic. It will provide what he describes as "glueless" symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), RAMBUS support, lock stepping for NSK. The EV8 21464 Alpha "Arana" technology is expected to arrive towards the end of 2001, in the same time frame as Intel's McKinley architecture is due. It will offer symmetric multithreading and 200SPECint95 at 1200MHz and even 1400MHz. The EV9 and EV10, thinks Shannon, are in advanced stages of development. Shannon says we will see one to four CPU Regatta class ES40s in Q2 of this year, along with the WebBrick DS10, which will have one to two CPUs. Again, in the same timeframe, we will see the VMSstation VS10. Compaq will release a 1-2 CPU Alpha ProLiant called the Catamaran in the middle of this year along with a one to four CPU ProLiant dubbed Schooner. We will see WildFire 16-CPU boxes by year end, as earlier revealed here. Future NT ProLiants will include the eight CPU Python, Diamondback, Cobra, and Copperhead boxes in the first half of next year. ®

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