The DEC Alpha 21164

This is another typical superscalar microprocessor. It can issue 4 instructions per clock. This makes it significantly more complex than the earlier 2-way version.

This was the second chip in DEC's 64-bit Alpha series. It contained 9.3 million transistors, mostly in the two 8 KB primary caches and in the 96 KB secondary cache. It was built with 0.5 micron lithography, and had four metal layers.

If the image looks a little featureless, it's because the number of pixels in this image is 39 times smaller than the chip's transistor count.


Last modified: 12 October 1999

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