Alpha strikes back against Intel

Caspian sees socket, .18 micron, 1GHz support

Sources close to Samsung in Korea have revealed the roadmap that Alpha Processor Ink (API) hopes will give it an edge over Intel in 2001.

The firm is readying its Caspian chipset, which will give full support for the 1GHz Alpha, and, in addition is set to roll out three mobos which will be in full production by the end of Q1 next year.

The UP 1500 will support 700MHz Alpha chips and provide DDR memory support, using the IG-4 chipset. It takes DDR DIMMs, supports Soundblaster and AGP2x, as well as having Ethernet support. It includes IDE Ultra DMA 66MHz and 32-bit PCI.

API's UP 2700 will be a Slot B compatible mobo, support 1GHz Alpha microprocessors and above, and use the Caspian chip set. It will provide support for 200MHz DDR DIMMs, which can be added up to 8Gb, has on board SCSI, 2Gb input/output, 66Mhz 64-bit PCI for six slots, and has three slots supporting 33MHz 32-bit PCI. It has 2 Ethernet ports.

The UP 1700 is a uniprocessor mobo, and supports a socketed, rather than a Slot B Alpha. It is similar to the UP 2700.

This socketed CPU will be EV68 .18 micron based, so there will be less power consumption and the processor will be faster.

In October, and as part of API's current mobo and chipset range, the Korean source said that 833MHz Slot B Alphas will arrive, while the UP2000+ mobo will be on offer. It has a 64-bit PCI bus and other unexceptional changes to the existing specifications.

The changes will start tomorrow. While API will accept new orders for the UP2000+, such orders will not be fulfilled until the product is available.

While it is currently not difficult to clock Alphas to 1GHz now, the chipset and memory controller is still not up to the task, the source reports, so usable speed is currently 833MHz. ®

See Also

64 bit Compaq Alpha tops 1040MHz