Fleshing out the details of its St Patrick’s Day announcement (CI No 3,122) concerning the cheap 21164PC processor, Digital Equipment Corp said that it had the part running at up to at least 625MHz in the lab, but it will come in 400MHz, 466MHz and 533MHz versions. Mother-boards with chip and memory will be a $1,000 and DEC is also talking about producing boxes with a 466MHz 21164PC that go for $2,600, hoping to make Intel Corp’s forthcoming 233MHz Klamath P6 eat its dust. Such a configuration would include 32Mb of memory, a 2.4Gb drive, a 15-inch screen, eight speed CD drives, 2Mb of graphics memory, along with NT and Office software. The 21164PC is the first Alpha to incorporate DEC’s MMX-matching Motion Video Instructions. Unfortunately volumes of the new chip are not supposed to be available until the third quarter, when 21164PC-based boxes, should start appearing. By then, DEC should have the second of the part’s two chipsets, Koala, ready. The other one is Pyxis. Our sister publication, ClieNT Server News understands that there are two stripped down boards: the PC164sx for around $500 with cache but no CPU and the PC164zx for around $350. The full motherboard should probably cost around $850 from alternate sources. Against Klamath, DEC will claim a 1.5 times improvement in SPECint, two times SPECfp, two times Softimage and 1.8 times AutoCAD. Meanwhile, ClieNT Server News, has heard of an Alpha chip running in the Maynard labs at 900MHz but is not sure which part it is.
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