Digital Equipment Corp last week made samples of its 200MHz Alpha RISC chips available, priced at $3,500. Volume shipments will start in July, at $1,231 apiece for quantities of over 10,000 – although it’s difficult to conceive of any third party able to forecast that it will ship 10,000 machines during the lifetime of the chip, and even the most optimistic parallel processor builder could hardly hope to ship that many nodes in any foreseeable time-frame. DEC also cut prices on its 150MHz Alpha to $853 from $1,355 a unit in 10,000-up quantities, effective July. Samples will be cut to $1,900 from $3,375 next month. The 150MHz version has been shipping since September. DEC said the 200MHz benchmarked at 200 SPECfp92 and 106 SPECint92 and an aggregate 184 SPECmark89. DEC claimed that at $7 an aggregate SPECmark, the chips beat out all comers on the price-performance curve. It also made a point of saying that the chips would enable personal computer applications reach their full potential under Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT.
