Benchmark Tests On The Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha Axp 21164-Based Alphaserver 8400, Including A Comparison Of Optimized Vector And Superscalar Processing.

: This paper reports single-processor performance of the DEC 8400 system, a multi-cpu mainframe based on the DEC 21164 microprocessor. Performance is compared with single processors of the CRAY J90, the IBM RISC System/6000 Model 39H, and the SGI Power Onyx (75 MHz MIPS R8000). Benchmark codes representing Los Alamos applications with a range of computational characteristics were used. An important part of the comparison uses a particle transport application with two implementations, one that is highly vectorized and one that is unvectorizable with memory access patterns more suitable for superscalar processors. The results suggest that the best architecture /implementation match is the vectorizable code running on the vector processor. Introduction The second generation of the Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) Alpha AXP microprocessor is referred to as the 21164. An important difference between it and its predecessor, the 21064, is that the 21164 has twice the multiply/add throughput pe..