One real-world look at Alpha vs x86 (and MIPS) performance was this .plan post from John Carmack: ----------------------------------------- John Carmack's .pla

One real-world look at Alpha vs x86 (and MIPS) performance was this .plan post from John Carmack: ----------------------------------------- John Carmack's .plan for Jun 25, 1997 ----------------------------------------- We got the new processors running in our big compute server today. We are now running 16 180mhz r10000 processors in an origin2000. Six months ago, that would have been on the list of the top 500 supercomputing systems in the world. I bet they weren't expecting many game companies. :) Some comparative timings (in seconds): mips = 180 mhz R10000, 1meg secondary cache intel = 200 mhz ppro, 512k secondary cache alpha = 433 mhz 21164a, 2meg secondary cache qvis3 on cashspace: cpus mips intel alpha ---- ---- ---- ---- 1 608 905 470 2 309 459 3 208 308 4 158 233 8 81 12 57 16 43 (14 to 1 scalability on 16 cpus, and that's including the IO!) The timings vary somewhat on other tools - qrad3 stresses the main memory a lot harder, and the intel system doesn't scale as well, but I have found these times to be fairly representative. Alpha is almost twice as fast as intel, and mips is in between. None of these processors are absolutely top of the line - you can get 195 mhz r10k with 4meg L2, 300 mhz PII, and 600 mhz 21164a. Because my codes are highly scalable, we were better off buing more processors at a lower price, rather than the absolute fastest available. Some comments on the cost of speed: A 4 cpu pentium pro with plenty of memory can be had for around $20k from bargain integrators. Most of our Quake licensees have one of these. For about $60k you can get a 4 cpu, 466 mhz alphaserver 4100. Ion Storm has one of these, and it is twice as fast as a quad intel, and a bit faster than six of our mips processors. That level of performance is where you run into a wall in terms of cost. To go beyond that with intel processors, you need to go to one of the "enterprise" systems from sequent, data general, ncr, tandem, etc. There are several 8 and 16 processor systems available, and the NUMA systems from sequent and DG theoretically scale to very large numbers of CPUS (32+). The prices are totally fucked. Up to $40k PER CPU! Absolutely stupid. The only larger alpha systems are the 8200/8400 series from dec, which go up to 12 processors at around $30k per cpu. We almost bought an 8400 over a year ago when there was talk of being able to run NT on it. Other options are the high end sun servers (but sparc's aren't much faster than intel) and the convex/hp systems (which wasn't shipping when we purchased). We settled on the SGI origin systems because it ran my codes well, is scalable to very large numbers of processors (128), and the cost was only about $20k per cpu. We can also add Infinite Reality graphics systems if we want to.