GoKawiil[Editor's note: This article was originally scheduled for publication in the September 1998 issue of BYTE Magazine but was canceled when BYTE folded in June 1998. It appeared instead in Windows NT Magazine and in C'T , a German computer magazine. This text is the original English version.]
While the world waits for Intel's 64-bit Merced chip and Microsoft's 64-bit version of Windows NT, Digital Equipment is offering a sneak preview of the next generation in NT processing. The Alpha 21264 is a 64-bit processor that runs NT. It's one of the fastest chips in the world. And it's available today.
The 21264 is the latest generation of the Alpha microprocessor architecture. Digital expects the 21264 to reach clock speeds of more than 700MHz this year, so this processor upholds the speed demon reputation that the 21164 and 21064 established for Alpha chips.
Alpha is the last RISC architecture for which Microsoft is developing future versions of NT. Microsoft is phasing out NT for MIPS Rx000 chips, and the PowerPC NT never really got off the ground. The only other CPU architecture that runs NT is, of course, Intel x86. Despite Intel's market dominance, the Alpha has one big advantage over the x86: increased performance, especially performance of floating-point tasks. Alpha systems generally cost more than their Intel counterparts, but Alpha systems are faster, and they excel at math-intensive engineering and scientific applications.
To move beyond the performance limitations of the 20-year-old x86, Intel partnered with HP in 1994 to develop a new CPU architecture: Intel Architecture-64 (IA-64). Intel expects systems that use the Merced processor, the first processor to implement IA-64, to ship in mid-2000. But the Merced might not be the fastest chip on the NT market in 2000. Digital says that by the time Merced appears, the 21264 will be running at a clock frequency of 1000MHz (1 gigahertz [GHz]). At that speed, the 21264 will be substantially faster than the Merced according to estimated CPU benchmarks. (For a review of 21264 speeds, see Figure 1.)
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