Digital Equipment Corp has previewed future plans for its Alpha AXP RISC in a roadmap which describes increased clock speeds and further superscalar enhancements. Development will continue on very high-performance Alpha iterations, and the chip will also appear in more integrated desktop versions as well as in 0.35 micron, 2.5V implementations for portable computing. New systems and upgrades are planned around the next EV45 Alpha release due in September which will go to 250 SPECmarks89. As well as faster, smaller versions of the existing 21064 part, there will be a second-generation 21164 line – EV5 and EV56 that will start out at from 200MHz to 300MHz. Performance will go to 500 SPECmarks89 and are due a year after EV45 and into 1995. A third generation 300MHz part called EV6 is set for 1996: it will integrate up to 30m transistors and reach 600 SPECmarks89. Integrated Alphas with Peripheral Component Interconnect bus and on-chip memory controllers will appear as the 21066 series.
