The Digital 21264 Alpha processor will run at speeds of 500 MHz and higher and is slated to deliver very-high benchmarks of above 30 SPECint95 and above 50 SPECfp95.
SPECint95 reflects the performance of business applications and certain multimedia applications, while SPECfp95 is a benchmark for scientific and engineering applications. The chip will execute MPEG 2 motion video and deliver extremely high data transfer rates between memory and the processor.
In related chip news, IBM discussed its next-generation PowerPC architecture-based G3 series of "Power2 Super Chips."
These processors are targeted at everything from supercomputers and IBM RS/6000 workstations to portables and consumer electronics, IBM said.
Future chips will integrate a whopping 15 million transistors (by comparison the P55C Pentium will have 4.5 million) and deliver "super floating point and memory bandwidth." These chips will be based on a 64-bit PowerPC architecture. The following generation of G4 series processors will use up to 50 million transistors.
