Digital Equipment Corp has a little Alpha road map it draws for customers showing the 15m-transistor EV6, otherwise the 21264 – capable of being clocked at 500MHz, it will ship next year- our sister paper Unigram.X reports. There has already been speculation that it should be able to deliver 800 to 1,000 SPECint92. Then there is a three-year interval on the map between the EV6 and the next generation, broken, it’s expected, at the 18-month mark by an EV6 shrink, the EV67, that raises the clock speed. The 100m-transistor EV7, the first Alpha based on a 0.25 micron process, is due in the year 2000. DEC seems to be a little more conservative these days and predicts it will take 500MHz to 750MHz clocks rather than the 800MHz we first heard. DEC watchers say it should be good for 3,000 SPECint92. Then there’s another three- year hiatus, again with an intervening EV78 shrink, before the next-generation 250m-transistor EV8 makes its appearance. It is intended to be done on a 0.18-micron process that will yields chips that can take clocks of between 750MHz and 1GHz. EV6 could turn out to be the first chip with an eight-way instruction issue. The EV7 is to be 16-way and the EV8 32-way. We imagine that whatever operating systems they may run, the compilers will have to be adjusted to optimize for those features.
