> That said, Alphas were mighty fast during their prime, I don't know if that was enabled by the insane memory model or just coincidence?
There were many of the same people working on:
- First 3 generations of DEC Alpha
- StrongARM
- SiByte MIPS (later purchased and rebranded by Broadcom)
- PASemi POWER
- PASemi was then aqui-hired by Apple for making ARM chips
These don't have any particularly unifying memory model, but were all quite performant, so while this may be a different coincidence, I suspect that the people involved are more likely a contributing factor to the performance than the memory model.
There were many of the same people working on:
- First 3 generations of DEC Alpha
- StrongARM
- SiByte MIPS (later purchased and rebranded by Broadcom)
- PASemi POWER
- PASemi was then aqui-hired by Apple for making ARM chips
These don't have any particularly unifying memory model, but were all quite performant, so while this may be a different coincidence, I suspect that the people involved are more likely a contributing factor to the performance than the memory model.