[geeks] Re: HP EV7 performance

[Joacim Melin]

I interviewed John Bennett of HP down at Ensa at Work 2003 in Amsterdam on 
monday and he told me that the last model of the Alpha will be the EV79 
that is released in 2004 (if I remember it correctly. The notes from 
the meeting are at work and I'm not. :) ).

I also asked him about how smart it is to cancel a CPU that can scale 
up to 64 CPU's and that's FAST and he mentioned the cost of maintaining 
the development of the Alpha and also that the "instruction set don't 
matter anymore".

As a long time fan of the Alpha, I think it's rather sad to see the 
Alpha go.


On Friday, Jan 24, 2003, at 17:13 Europe/Stockholm, Gavin Hubbard wrote:

> <<<<
> Hmm... I'm reading the news bulletin from HP about their EV7
> announcement. Heh. Apart from the fact that the EV7 has an integrated
> interconnetion interface, they build'em together as a tourus.
> They even claim 37 TeraFlops on their SC1280 supercomputer.
>
> Major woodie here.
>
> /Bjorn
>>>>>
>
> <<I accidentally posted the following message to the resuce list, 
> sorry for the duplication>>
>
> I asked the HP enterprise accounts manager for New Zealand why HP 
> killed the
> Alpha. He told me "...as soon as the Alpha was no longer twice as fast 
> as the
> competition we saw no point in continuing development..."
>
> I've never understood this line of reasoning. IMO the whole 'point' of 
> the
> Alpha was the architecture, scalability, and code-base. The extra raw
> performance delta was just gravy.
>
> Damn suits.
>
> --Gavin
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>
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin

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who > joacim melin
how > joacim at melin.org
where > http://z80.org
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