COMPAQ CLAIMS NEW ALPHA SERVERS OUT PERFORM THOSE BY SUN, IBM, HP.Compaq Computer Corp. announced significant processor enhancements to its high-end AlphaServer GS60, GS60E, and GS140 systems late last week. The AlphaServer offerings are based on technology Compaq acquired along with its buy of Digital Equipment Corp, developer of the fast Alpha RISC RISC in full Reduced Instruction Set Computing Computer architecture that uses a limited number of instructions. RISC became popular in microprocessors in the 1980s. microprocessor. Houston-based Compaq says the new Alpha 21264A processor (EV67) running at 700 MHz (MegaHertZ) One million cycles per second. It is used to measure the transmission speed of electronic devices, including channels, buses and the computer's internal clock. A one-megahertz clock (1 MHz) means some number of bits (16, 32, 64, etc. will deliver as much as 30% to 50% performance improvement, with no recompilation Re`com`pi`la´tion n. 1. A new compilation. necessary, over current systems. The new processor is available now in new AlphaServer GS systems and as a field upgrade for older systems. "The performance of these enhanced AlphaServers reinforces our commitment to provide customers with significant performance, scalability and reliability advantages in deploying NonStop eBusiness Solutions," says Bill Heil, general manager of the Business Critical Server Division at Compaq. In Java performance This article is a general presentation of the Java Platform performance. For criticisms about Java performance, and more generally about the Java language, see Criticism of Java. , Compaq says the latest AlphaServer GS Series running Tru64 UNIX The 64-bit Unix operating system for HP's AlphaServers. Formerly Digital Unix when Alpha was a product family from Digital Equipment Corporation, it was renamed Tru64 Unix in 1999 by Compaq (HP acquired Compaq in 2002). "significantly outperformed" all other platforms with, for example, a 53% advantage over HP, 119% faster than Sun, and a full 267% over IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) IBM's Unix-based operating system which runs on its Intellistation workstations and pSeries, p5, iSeries and i5 server families. . In the first two cases, Compaq's Java Compatible Fast VM demonstrated a significant performance advantage over Sun's new HotSpot Java compiler running competitive UNIX systems. "We are investing aggressively to achieve the best Java application performance with Tru64 UNIX on AlphaServers as part of Compaq's NonStop eBusiness initiative," Heil says. The new 700 MHz AlphaServer GS60E running Tru64 UNIX generated a geometric mean (mathematics) geometric mean - The Nth root of the product of N numbers. If each number in a list of numbers was replaced with their geometric mean, then multiplying them all together would still give the same result. SPECjvm98 result of 75.2, representing the highest result ever reported to SPEC, Compaq claims. "Compaq's latest Tru64 UNIX Alpha Java performance results are quite impressive," affirms Steve Garone, program director for Application Development and Deployment at IT research firm International Data Corporation. "It's clear that Compaq is committed to helping its customers run Java applications with extremely high performance." Compaq also says the release of benchmark results on the newest AlphaServer GS Series re-establishes the Alpha processor as the world's fastest integer and floating point processor. Benchmark results submitted include a SPECint95 of 39.1 and a SPECfp95 of 68.1. The AlphaServer GS60E has also been expanded to support eight processors. Prices for the new GS60E start at $85,000. Prices for the new AlphaServer GS140 start at $384,900. Both are available this month. |
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