CompuServe Messages

Charles, You know, SGI has never been famous for the speed of their main CPU. Where they have made their mark is their hardware 3D engines. For that it doesn't really matter how fast the processor is since the 3D hardware is doing all the work. I don't think the Alpha will have a chance against the SGI as far as realtime 3D is concerned. A generalized processor will not be able to keep up with the specialized 3D hardware. That's not to say that the Alpha won't be successful… The Pentium may be slower but it runs virtually ALL the existing PC software. This give it an enormous advantage in the PC marketplace. I suspect the Alpha to be competing in the workstation market, not the PC market. I expect to see Intel dominate the market for at least 5 more years. If I recall correctly, the Alpha that's running NT is actually running a 486 code via an interpreter to execute DOS and Windows programs. This method of running a foreign instruction set on a computer generally results in executing about 10 instructions to emulate each instruction from the target machine. Even if the Alhpa has twice as many MIPS, it's having to run 10 times as many IPS to accomplish the same task, resulting in 1/5 the real speed. Of course that will change once native Alpha NT versions of the software are available. A Windows paint program is probably the perfect demo from DEC's point of view. It's not a CPU intensive task (so running 1/10 it's real MIPS is not a problem) and drawing to the screen via Windows functions can be optimized for the Alpha. Commodore used the same trick many years ago with the Amiga. You could buy a software package that emulated a PC and could run many PC programs. It actually ran 1/10 to 1/20 the speed of a PC, but if you demo it with the right software (software where the bottleneck is the user, not the computer) it didn't seem so bad… John.