What type of chip is Alpha? Pentium?
Pentium, introduced in March 93, is the latest in the 80×86 series from Intel, after the 486. Intel chose to call it Pentium, rather than 586, for commercio-legal reasons. Like the other x86 CPUs, it has a CISC instruction set. However, it also uses several advanced techniques for better performance — e.g, superscalar execution and a highly pipelined floating-point unit. It has 32 bit wide registers, on-chip instruction and data caches of 8 KB each, eight general purpose and eight FP registers, and uses little-endian byte ordering. The chip runs at 66 MHz, has about 3.1 million transistors, runs at 5 V and consumes 16 W of peak power. It is packaged as a 273 pin PGA (pin grid array).Alpha 21064, launched in February 92, marks Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)’s entry into the `supermicro’ manufacturing market. The Alpha is a superscalar RISC CPU running at an amazing 200 MHz. It is a pure 64 bit machine, with 64 bit wide registers and data bus.
