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Don't let its calm exterior fool youthis 500MHz Alpha-based workstation is screaming to perform your mostcomplex calculations.
The last time we reviewed an Alpha-based workstation was in December 1996, when we examined Digital Equipment Corp.'s AlphaStation 500 5/333 (UNIX Review, p. 51). Considerable water has passed under the bridge since then. DEC was acquired by Compaq, we changed our name to Performance Computing, and technology has continued its relentless push forward. What changes have been made to the venerable AlphaStation in the meantime? To update you on the status of Alpha computing, we examined Compaq's recently released XP1000 Professional Workstation, a 500MHz 64-bit system that is the new high end of the Compaq workstation line.
OF NOTE
The first thing you will notice about the XP1000 is that Compaq has migrated this Alpha workstation away from the RISC-traditional pizza-box chassis to the mini-tower design more common for PCI-based systems. Although we will delve into more detail about the innards of the machine later in the review, there are a few high-level features worth noting now. As part of the new mini-tower design, Compaq has opted for tool-free access to the internal components. Thumbscrews at the rear of the machine let you remove the single-piece top-and-side panel, giving you access to all of the internal components from one side of the system. Although the average user won't care much about this change, it will be a boon to system administrators who need to install new cards or upgrade the system. Once you have removed the access panel, you will notice that the CPU resides on a daughter card, not directly on the motherboard. Although Compaq is mum about future clock-rate plans for the Alpha processor, should you decide to upgrade to a faster processor in the future, this design feature will make that procedure easier.
At the heart of the XP1000 is Compaq's new Alpha 21264 processor, running at 500MHz. The 21264 incorporates an MMX-like multimedia instruction set (aimed mostly at video encoding), has 128KB of on-chip LI cache (64KB each for instructions and data), and can handle up to 16MB of L2 cache. The standard configuration includes 4MB of L2 cache, providing a performance boost for applications that have large data sets. As...