When does doubling 533 get you 700? 

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Links mentioned in this column: 

Samsung announcement: fastest Alpha 
http://www.techweb.com/wire/news/1997/10 
/1030samsung.html 

SPECweb96 benchmark 
http://www.specbench.org/osg/web96/ 
 
 
 
 

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With the news that Intel would buy and take over manufacturing of Digital's Alpha processor, resolving the suit over the appropriation of patented Alpha chip designs, some closely related news hasn't received the attention it otherwise might.  

We're referring to the announcement last week (Oct. 30) by Samsung, another licensed Alpha partner of Digital's, of a new version of the chip that will run at the record speed of 700 MHz. Samsung is shipping samples now, and has promised to begin mass production early next year, using a new, latest-word-in-thin 0.25 micron process. Samsung says this will result in dramatic performance gains which Intel won't be able to match for six months to a year. 

But this also brings up an interesting point. According to a Samsung spokesperson, "This should double the performance over the present 533-MHz version." A quick button-clicking interlude with our calculator shows that doubling 533 does not equal 700, so there must be more to the story.  

We'll save the details for another time, but suffice it to say that since they're talking about doubling the speed of the 533 MHz chip, megahertz(MHz)-counting is not the most accurate way to measure the brawniness of your computer's brain. How many instructions does a given processor execute per tick of the clock, for instance? 

Whatever happened to MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second), the old mainframe measuring stick? The recent SPECweb96 benchmark takes this type of approach, measuring HTTP operations per second on World Wide Web servers with test workloads carefully built to be typical of real-world use. 

No benchmark is perfect, of course (since we don't live in a perfect world), but surely something like this yields a more useful answer than 2 x 533 = 700 when you're trying to decide what to buy. 
 

Meanwhile, since one of our favorite points is focusing on what's usable today - we can't help but point out that the Digital Alpha-based solutions you can have working for you now are not only the fastest available, but also proven workhorses. Do you have pokey, pent-up systems just because "everybody's doing it"? Don't you owe it to yourself to learn about the systems that are measurably the best? 

Servers: 
http://www.digital.com/alphaserver/ 

Workstations: 
http://www.workstation.digital.com/products/alphstns.html 
 

The Current Line-up

In this edition of AltaVista MarketSpace, : 

NeWWWs goes into more detail this week on those nasty people who are dumping canned luncheon meat into the AltaVista Search index.  
Some 'spammers' send junk e-mail to millions of mailboxes; some submit hundreds of duplicate URLs and so on to search engines to stuff results pages with their links, thereby junking it up for the rest of us. AltaVista Search is going to war with them, and NeWWWs has the story. 

Solution Works shows how you can turn your workplace virtual, so you're able to communicate with your teammates and access your documents through the Web, anytime, from anywhere. 

Speaking Internet wants you to forget about firewalls... (no, wait, that's not right) - wants you to find a firewall so reliable that you can forget about it, because it's just there doing it's job and Covering Your Assets.(There's one acronym we imagine you won't find in our new Glossary of Internet terms. ;- ) 

Keep connected, 
Bill Ross 
Editor 

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