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Alpha-Based Samsung Linux Goodness
Peter Dyck writes: "This summer Compaq divested itself of the Alpha technology. The Alpha tech was purchased by Intel who most likely will bury it after grafting its best aspects to their own 64 bit IA-64 system. However, the non-exclusive terms of the deal allowed Samsung
to continue producing and developing the best 64-bit processor architecture there is today. Now, as a happy owner of a four years old DEC AlphaPC164 I was delighted to see this announcement by Samsung Electronics. In short, the upcoming UP1500 motherboard will house a 64 bit 800+ MHz Alpha 21264B CPU, 4 GB DDR memory, 10/100 Mps LAN, USB and yes, it will run Linux."
but what about the 21364 chip? Is that gone?
Anyone know a place (online) that sells these chips?
Motherboards for them?
Any SMP motherboards out there?
- jonathan.
Since HP bought Compaq Im interested to see where the DEC will go.
The UP1500 was developed long before the Compaq/Intel Alphacide... it is not clear whether Samsung has any intention of continuing to support Alpha.
I've been running alphas as shell and firewall boxes on my home lan for a few years now. Even though they are pricey, cheap ones are fast and with the compaq c compiler any real work I have to do is well taken care of. It's good to see that the processor line will continue. Now if they'd develop on freebsd a little more.....
I do not want to sound offtopic, but that sounds like the ultimate machine for any sub-50 employee business and/or graphic design. Personally, i did not even know Alpha architecture was still being made. It's great to see that after all of this time, the best there was is still around!
Great Read,
Thanks,
Aj
-------
artlu.net
"Best 64bit Architecutre" -- I find that slightly subjective. The UltraSparc line brings lots to the table and even IA-64 has some redeeming qualities. Although technologically astounding the Alpha is more or less a dead chip. Revolutionary when it came out it has been superceeded by the features and speed of other processors. It's lack of popularity has lead it to fall by the wayside, unfortunate as it may be.
With that said, I feel that Intel makes a superior processor and Alpha's are already a bit outdated. Almost all modern apps require x-86 extensions such as MMX, SSE, and 3dNow, which Alphas do not support. I'd rather be running a hardware platform which supports these innovations and allows software to overcome x86 limitations. Alpha's are 64 bit processors, and they are quite fast, but they do not offer the specialised hardware instructions that x86 supports. Alpha's are like 1960's muscle cars. They're fast, but only because of the brute force under the hood. X86 machines are sleek and smoothe like a Porche because they use brilliant engineering and specialised extensions like SSE. I'll take the Porche over the outdated horsepower any day.
Furthermore, Alphas are limited in the software platforms on which they support. Only certain flavors of Unix will run on an Alpha, while Almost all Unices, Windows, DOS, BSD, OS/2 etc. are supported by x86 based processors.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Fact one: what distinguishes Alpha from IPF is not some "pieces" that could be copied over, but a superior design and architecture. In order to take advantage of that, Intel would have to dump IPF and start over, effectively selling Alpha under a different name. That would be an unthinkable about-face.
There is a very nice Alpha-EPIC comparision white paper from Digital, a shame I don't have the URL.
Fact two: the deal just preceded the HP-Compaq one. It's a marchitecture thing.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
The present CPU that is employed in Compaq machines like the AlphaServerSC and the Wildfire and in various cluster systems is the Alpha EV67 processor. The previous chip was shipped with a clock speed ranging from 666-833 Mhz. IIRC, the EV67 was able to deliver up to two floating-point results per clock cycle. The load/store units could load 16 B/cycle while the store bandwidth is slightly smaller: 10.6B/cycle. The bandwidth to memory is 5.3B/cycle, however, the type of memory determines the actual bandwidth through the bank cycle time of the memory. We were expecting a scaled up version of this chip named the EV68. It was projected to have an 833Mhz clock speed. I believe that this is perhaps some version of it.
The density used is 0.18 instead of 0.25 which enables the location of a 1.5 MB secondary cache on chip. The largest difference will be that there will be 4 dual channels from the chip to interconnect it with neighouring chips at a bandwidth of 1.6 GB/s per single channel for what Compaq has called "seamless SMP processing". The path to memory is implemented by 4x5 Rambus links as the systems will be fitted with Rambus memory. The direct I/O dual link from the chip also has a bandwidth of 1.6 GB/s. Theoretically the chip could run at speeds of upward 1Ghz.
I know that the Alpha 21264B is based loosely on the EV line of chips (more specifically the 67 and 68), can anybody further verify this with some more details? Thanks.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
The Alpha is dead. And in its day it was great. its time to move on.
Support Texas Troops use TXGoogle
Heh heh... I'd like to run FreeBSD on it. IIRC, it supports the Alpha.
I think 21264B is the beefed up version with 0.18 Micron. You should look at the specs: here, while 21264 is here. You can then compare it side by side.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Alright! The Itanium 64.
./pnames.pl
./pnames.pl
./pnames.pl
./pnames.pl
./pnames.pl
./pnames-pl
How do they come up with these processor names, you ask? An astute question, one that requires some of Intel and AMD's most closely-kept company secrets. A friend of mine who used to work for Intel managed to smuggle the following Perl script out, shortly before he was fired. Here it is:
#!/bin/perl
# Copyright (C) 1997 Intel Corporation
# This is a proprietary Intel perl script.
@prefix = ( "Pent", "It", "Max", "Ath", "Cort", "Trit" );
@suffix = ( "ium", "alon", "ex", "anium", "oricon", "agon",
"on", "eres", "obos", "ymede", "itan", "erion" );
@tag = ( "II", "III", "IV", "Pro", "MMX", "Deluxe" );
srand;
printf( "%s%s %s\n", $prefix[rand 6], $suffix[rand 12], $tag[rand 6] );
So if we run this script, we can see where the names come from:
sg1 237%
Cortium II
sg1 238%
Pentalon IV
sg1 239%
Penteres III
sg1 240%
Athalon Pro
sg1 241%
Pentitan II
sg1 242%
Maxymede MMX
Please show discretion when you refer this script to others. It is, after all, an Intel proprietary secret and should therefore only be shared with others on a "need-to-know" basis.
Would you care to have a read of here and then explain your car analogy again?
The only Good System is a Sound System
I used to be a hardware engineer at compaq (before the layoffs) and this guy is totally right. The Alpha 21264B is a direct variation of the EV type chips.
MOD PARENT UP
You have to go to the link, and make sure to look at the large image near the bottom.
The image shows the 32bit pci bus only running at 33Mhz! I mean... I own a DIGITAL AlphaStation 4/233, and it has a 33Mhz. THis box is from 97.
Just guessing from what I saw on the page... the kit is a strange malgamation of old, and new technology. The system has 133Mhz, btw nothing new for Alpha, for the memory bus, but not the pci bus.
So... its is 64 bits.... but it isn't that special either.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
is this part of the specifications:
"2MB of flash ROM
- SRM Console for Linux Install"
This means a REAL setup, with a command prompt. just like a REAL server should have (Think on SUN, PA-RISC, etc) not that crapy menus x86 machines have.
Way to go Samsung. Add 2 or 3 more PCI slots and it'll be even better.
Oh, and did you noticed te AMD 761 North Bridge ? nothing strange here. Athlon shares the same bus with Alpha. AMD licensed it a long time ago, so using an AMD chipset makes perfect sense.
What ? Me, worry ?
I honestly can't tell. I assume that it's sarcasm, but it is written somewhat like a troll, too.
Just curious
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
WOW, that's sure to be a big hit. They'll sell TENS of them.
/.ers will probably just wait for the purged stock to show up on eBay.
Then again, this market cycle is too well known for Linux-oriented hardware at this point, so all the
What exactly is "REAL WORK???" Last time I checked the people in the GFX dept where I worked did real work and they do most of it in Photoshop...
I remember about 8 years ago, the Pentium was just released with a maximum clock of 100MHz. At the same time, Alpha chips had clock speeds of 275MHz. How come Intel chips have increased clock speed by a factor of 20 while Alpha have increased by a factor of 3?
(Yes, I know that performance depends on much more than just clock speed.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I mean, the NetBSD port is supposed to be cleaner right ?
has he died nine times yet?
An older board - the UP2000 - is a dual processor SDRAM (not DDR) based Alpha motherboard, which has 6 PCI slots, two of which are 64-bit.
This new board has DDR ram, but only 32-bit PCI, and then only three slots. While nice and all - DDR is good, and of course it's for the Alpha 21264B, not 21264A - this does seem a bit of a step backwards in the IO stakes. Especially when it's noted that the UP2000 has onboard Ultra-2 SCSI as well.
Perhaps this board was originally targetted at the 'lower-end' workstation segment? Does anyone know if a more server-oriented 21264B board is on the way? It seems sadly unlikely given the current circumstances.
If one wants to have 64-bit multiprocessing on a budget, what are the current alternatives?
33 MHz... that's it. you can't make make PCI-32 go any faster than this, or you'll end up with a frozen system, malfuctioning cards, and other kinds of bizarre things. remember old PC-XT 12 MHz ??? well, I do. corrupted files was the least of our problems when we had to deal with overclocked ISA buses.
If you want a faster PCI bus you'll have to search for a PCI-64 mother-board. these boards have PCI slots with 64 bit data-path running at 66 MHz, but they require special cards to take advantage of the extra speed/bits. If you attach a normal PCI card to a PCI-64 slot it'll work with 32 bit data-path at 33 MHz.
Also, forget about the memory clock. There's a north bridge controler between the memory and the CPU. Take an overclockable Athlon mother board like Soyo Dragon as an example. You can boost the CPU front-side-bus way beyond 133 MHz, but the memory clock will remain at 133 MHz.
What ? Me, worry ?
hiya, ev4 = 21064 ev45 = 21064A ev5 = 21164 ev56 = 21164A ev6 = 21264 ev67 = 21264A and so on. The ev's are the nicknames, the 21's are the release names. The "two-digit" ev's are minor modifications on the base architecture. For example, the 21064A increased the on-chip cache from 8kB to 16kB. The 21164A I think was just a process shrink, but not sure. nick
The Alpha was a good architecture for the time, but with 2+GHz Pentiums I can't see getting excited about a 64 bit workstation. Especially from Samsung, who to the best of my knowledge has never been a player in the workstation market. Workstations are pretty much gone as a market, Sun seems to be the only people staying afloat, SGI is dead, HP has sold thier soul to Intel. The x86 architecture isn't that great but they got the bucks to continue development and beat other better architectures by shear size of thier warchest. I hate to admit it but good engineering often looses to strong marketing (kinda makes you want to cry), but thats the unfortunate truth. I'm not sure if IA-64 will do that well, I think its going to be a tough transition, Intel will probably be forced to make more generations of x86 and AMD seems to be beating them using a lower clock rate, so it may just be a good time to invest in AMD. Its about time that somre revolutionary architecture comes in a shakes things up, things like StrongARM are a step in the right direction, but not really competive for desktop. Transmeta has great technology, but why buy a simulation when you can afford the real thing, Intel has improved their technology by borrowing from Transmeta so Intel in getting ahead and Transmeta without the huge sums of cash is falling further and further behind.
Seriously Intel buys Alpha, one of the fastest processors and kills it. I would rather see new alphas being sold than IA64 or x86 because it is a design that is proven and mature as opposed to IA64 which is murder to program in assembly and is a big problem when writing a compiler. Intel take your 3ghz PIV stick it in your pipe and smoke it, just deliver a processor that makes sense.
I'm coming to have a lot of respect for Samsung lately, what with their flat panels with integrated TV tuners, HDTV ready flat panels, their nice cheap 770 TFT (of which I have several tied together with a Matrox G200MMS card), their Yepp MP3 player (of which I have one)(it even plays my cdex/lame encoded vbr mp3s), and a host of other cool products, not to mention a nice website. (menu: who we are, what we sell, where we are. Just what we need to know.)
This Alpha board is another in their seemingly endless line of cheap but good products, not cutting edge like IBM or Sony, but taking existing technology and getting it to the masses at a reasonable price and quality.
(/jonbrewer thinks he'll head to etrade and put his money where his mouth is.)
Comparing processors to cars...my god who would ever do a thing like that ?
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
Actually, "EV" stood for "Extended-VAX" very early on when the strategy was that VMS (when it was still "VMS", not "OVMS") was the only operating system that would be using the Alpha. (And, Alpha was the code name for the Extended VAX, 64 bit architecture project - the only time that a project's code name was officially transmorgified into the final product name. The 'AXP' crap was a short-lived marketing affectation).
The "21" in the CPU part number referred to the 21st Century, in the hope/belief that the architecture would last well into the 21st Century. The middle digit refers to the various iterations, just like Intel, and the "64" refers to the ALU data path bit widths. The EV3 was the first experimental chip, with little or no memory management (and no FP, 'tho I can't remember). The EV4 was the first production release, used in the various DEC 3000s and 4000. The EV45 was so named because it was an EV4 made with EV5 parts, and its part number was 21064A. The EV68 is basically an EV6 (21264) made with the 0.1something process that was originally envisioned for the EV8. And, yes, there's an EV7 forthcoming (and that's no secret - it was part of the overall announcement), and yes, they're bloody fast, and they'll be shipping before decent Unobtaniums will be.
And, yes, I'm an AC, but I hope that the reason is fairly obvious by now...
For those folk who continue to RISC vs CISC debate you'll find that both design mentalities have been munged together to where modern CPU's show qualities from both camps. Best description comes from this peice on arstechnica.... It's well worth the read.
Article
MIPS is better.
From here: http://www.theinquirer.net/02040103.htm
Samsung Alpha board suffers from DDR famine
And fails to deliver on 1GHz Alpha
By Pete Sherriff , 31 March 2001
THE JOINT VENTURE which produces mobos for the DEC (sorry Compaq) Alpha microprocessor is suffering from a severe shortage of DDR cache memory, according to sources acutely close to the acute famine.
The UP 1500 Alpha, which supports a 21264 Alpha at up to 800MHz speed and comes with 4MB or 8MB of level two DDR cache, is intended to arrive in July, with typical systems costing around $4,500.
But a shortage of cache for the processor is hampering production, leaving system integrators truly "up in arms" and Samsung embarrassed at the short-fall.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
>How come Intel chips have increased clock speed by a factor of 20 while Alpha have increased by a factor of 3?
,and some powerusers/scientists, noticed.
Without going too technical, intel designed it's pentium IV to be highly scalable in speed (but look at how poor it performs mhz/mhz-wise compared with AMD), Alpha had a good design from the start and they've built around it, intel went for the marketting hype machine.
Also keep in mind that since over 2 years, not much work or funding has been put on Alpha technology... basically it's the same chip with more cache, reducing die size to increase clock speed and stick yet more cache, nothing much, nothing new, intel did the same with the pentium II/III... but in the same timeframe, intel pushed a lot of R&D and $$$ to pump out it's next generation processors. There's NO DOUBT that with the same energy, you'd probably have a 21464 making the IA64 a bigger joke that it is right now.
The thing that pisses me the most in this story, is I come from an amiga background, I had a lot of respect for both alpha and Mips back then (remember the Raptor Screamernet renderfarm (Mips-based) that you'd stick near you amiga toaster system and it would render 25 to 40 times faster?, or the first lightwave port to alpha, screaming over 40 times the speed or my poor amiga 4000?), I knew that if my platform would eventually die, I'd have a supersweet alternative.
But what happened? Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows2000 on the alpha, ok no problem, there's still some unix alternatives (but kiss goodbye to seeing alpha as a powerfull Windows workstation), and like if that wasn't enough, compaq bought it, waited, left it to die.. just like gateway did with the amiga. Wait till the technology gets too old (funny fact is even 2 years later the alpha CPU is still good and can be compared to current systems...2 years.... think about it).
Anyways, the treatment the Alpha got is so unfair, it went the same way MIPS went, same way amiga went, and it's a proof that it's not the best technologies that wins. When I was still dreaming about seeing Win2K on alpha, and Compaq released it's workstation shortly after buying DEC, I knew there was something wrong because they would NEVER compare to intel, NEVER. but NEVER I thought that one day, the potential INTEL competitor would get bought by.... INTEL.
Here goes my dream of seeing intel shoving 64bits technology into mainstream and normal people and general benchmarks sites noticing "hey, speaking of 64 bits, there's that Alpha processor that is 3 times faster... woah 3times?!? it's worth to check!!! it might be the next AMD!"
It is.. (even if it's pre-amd) only geeks like us
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
hey AC, does the ev7 use SMT? How many thread contexts? or was that ev8?
If you are hungry for knowledge, slashdot is an all you can eat shmorgasboard...woof!
(Still scanning all the pdfs)
Man 'o man this brings back memories.
I remember a discussion on architecture a while back when I was a newbie about which was better; the invariable "CISC vs RISC" discussion that degenerated into a flame war of mac vs pc.
(being a newbie at the time, that was an introduction to what a flame war was. Glad I had the sense to lurk and listen.)
As the discussion raged on with benchmarks of floating point and integer, FLOPS, expandability, usability and so forth, an Alpha user spoke up.
I forget the exact words but it went something like this:
"I've been reading this thread with great amusement for some time, because *everyone* in it points to a single benchmark run one at a time. On the machine I am posting from I run a NNTP server that transfers about 3G a day, an FTP server that does even more serving internally and externally, I'm a mirror for (I forget who he said) and, keep in mind, before posting to this forum, I was playing Quake @ 50fps. When you can do half of what I am doing on your pc's and mac's or even *touch* my frame rate, then we'll talk."
To say the discussion ended abruptly would be an understatement.
As a point of reference it was about 1994 or so and the pentium was maybe at the 100Mhz mark. 3G of data when 500M was an "increadible" amount of space. Getting Quake up to 30fps on your average pc was darn near impossible to mere mortals (much less a newbie such as myself at the time).
After that, well, Alphas have always been awe inspiring because then, like now (reading the specs) these processors are beasts!
And SMP systems that are becoming common today, well, Alphas and Suns were the only ones I was aware of (at the time) capable of such things...or were more common than their mac/pc counterparts.
Aw, man, I've gone on long enough, sorry about that.
/me wipes away a tear. {sniff}
Thanks to all the posters of the specs, it is going to be a few days until I can wipe this stupid grin off my face.
Cheers,
GISboy
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
The Alpha stands alone as the fastest floating point processor for the money (bang for the buck). With the Compaq cc and fortran compilers, this beast blows away anything else. For scientific and engineering applications, none better. Of course, I recall Linus said years ago the future for Linux was in games not calculations. I think he has underestimated the calculations side.
your vacuous ontopic ramblings are nearly as impressive as sig 11's were
This is a little thing that people don't talk about much. Of course, it's quite possible that it doesn't deserve to be talked about much.
Memory management is becoming more difficult to do efficiently these days due to the fact that the most commonly used processors (Intel-based) use a memory page size of 4 kilobytes. Each chunk of 4kB must be managed by the operating system. This is the unit of memory used for a great many operations. Swap space is also referred to as the `paging area', where little-used memory pages of running programs get sent.
Of course, 4kB isn't the only page size that Intel CPUs support -- they can also handle 4MB pages (a little large)! 64-bit successors to the Intel x86 platform (both x86-64 and IA64) only support these same page sizes.
Other CPUs can handle different page sizes. I think SPARCs generally have 32kB pages. Alphas apparently do 8kB. Many processors have variable page sizes as well.
While I doubt the page-size issue is going to cause anything to completely keel over anytime soon, I do think that more flexibility could make memory management more efficient and increase performance.
okay, let's review...
The Inquirer has a story posted March 31, 2001 about the UP1500. it says the product is "is intended to arrive in July". it is now November.
these mailing list posts (including some by yours truly), show that the Samsung page in question, has been around since at least April 2001 and so has a page which has listed the UP1500 as "Under Development" ever since.
now, i'm no expert, but i think it is fairly safe to call this vaporware. maybe the motherboard will come out at some point, but for right now, it's silly to treat it as news.
(i will refrain from making commentary about how certain news *cough* organizations should check their sources before posting stories. oops! i just did.)
...founded on something as silly as a good amber monitor from them. Used it for ten years, exclusivly and it still works. Samsung does make some good stuff.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I think I will stick with my Tyan Tiger, with 2 x 1.2 Ghz Athlon's. $500 for the board, 2 processors and 256MB of RAM, life does not get better than this.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
While there is no doubt that there is lot of cruft in the x86, you have to give Intel credit for getting way more performance out of it than anyone thought they wood. I remember back in the early 90s everyone kept talking about how RISC was going to kick Intel's ass for these very reasons: they would never be able to overcome the limitations of having to support backward compatibility. Yet, they are still standing, and RISC's advantages are very small in real terms.
You should probably doublecheck your sources, as they seem to have misinformed you on a couple of points.
Firstly, the past several generations _are_ RISC chips, with a wrapper around them that translates x86 instructions. This is why Intel chips have more decode stages in the pipeline than any clean architecture would (and why they were so eager to use a trace cache in the Itanium - among other things, it lets them skip the decode stages for instruction batches the processor has seen recently).
Secondly, there is a *huge* performance difference in practice between RISC and CISC architectures, for the simple reason that you can't pipeline CISC processors. You have instructions that do wildly varying amounts of work, taking wildly varying amounts of time to do it, sometimes without the total execution time being known (like the "loop" and "rep [foo]" instructions). Pipelining requires an instruction set with instructions that take roughly the same amount of time and that share many steps in common between instructions. RISC neatly provides all of this.
You can partially pipeline a CISC machine by only pipelining some types of instruction - heck, even a RISC machine will need to special-case things like divide operations - but pipelining is far, far more effective with a RISC architecture.
This was one more nail in the coffin of CISC cores (there are serious hardware and compiler complexity problems too).
If I remember correctly, this board was originally announced back in March, or at least that's when I first came across it. It's essentially an upgrade from the UP1100 (AMD-750 PC100 SDRAM) using AMD's uniprocessor DDR chipset.
As to how much availability we'll ever see from this...well, I can't say for sure, but there are a few caveats. First off, a couple months ago, API Networks -- the joint Compaq-Samsung company created to build and sell Alpha based products -- laid off their server division (about 25% of the company) in order to transition to being a silicon company. Furthermore, it was reported last month that AMD will discontinue production of the AMD-760 chipset (which the UP1500 is based on) as they feel it is no longer needed to support the Athlon platform following the introduction of VIA's KT266A, Nvidia's nForce, and so on. So this means that it may not even be possible for the UP1500 to be productized (according to Samsung, it is still listed as "Under Development" -- the same as it was eight months ago) due to the lack of a source of AMD-760 core logic, and even if it is released, there may not be anyone to support it.
Unfortunately time stands still for no man.
EV8 chip is the SMT monster. EV7 chip is an EV6 core with a HyperTransport interface replacing the EV6 bus. It also includes an 8-channel RDRAM memory controller.
.5um, the EV56 in .35um.
.35um 466-667MHz, the EV67 was .25um 667-833MHz, the EV68 was .18um 833-1000MHz, the upcoming EV69 is .13um.
For the record for everyone else, "EV" means "Extended VAX". The first generation Alpha was the EV4 aka 21064, the second was the EV5 aka 21164, the third is the EV6 aka 21264, the fourth is the EV7 aka 21364, etc.
When you see EV56, that second digit denotes a more advanced manufacturing process than the original. For example, the EV5 was fabbed in
The EV6 was
The EV69 (This is not the 21264B or E) is supposed to debut at 1.3GHz, have an undisclosed amount of on-die L2, takes up 82mm2 of die space, uses Copper interconnects and consumes just 65W. And rumor has it that it's pin compatible with Socket-A/462, now that the L2 is on-die.
...and you'll see that the UP1500 board has been available for some time now.
http://www.harddata.com/spx264-15brief.html
It is worth knowing that Microway will continue producing the 264DP motherboard that API dropped a while back. Thus Samsung isn't the only source for Alpha motherboards. And the 264DP rocks:
;-) an 8GB per process vm limit. If you want more virtual memory (don't think swap, just virtual memory), you need to fiddle with your own segment/offset layer or similar.
*) Dual capable
*) Dual memory busses, *each* with 2.6 GB/sec
*) 4GB memory max (I wish this were higher)
*) Dual 64bit PCI busses, don't know the speed
*) Built-in Adaptec SCSI, usb, etc. FWIW, Microway seems to prefer adding an Intraserver PCI SCSI controller (Symbios based) and avoiding the Adaptec controller.
These motherboards can really push data. Systems at 500MHz and 667MHz built around these boards crush x86 cpus at twice or thrice their clock speed. These systems are somewhat expensive, but they're worth every penny. You just can't get similar floating point performance or memory bandwidth from x86 machines, even with the new ServerWorks chipsets.
Because the Alphas are a 64 bit architecture, your per-process memory space is huge. You won't get above 3GB virtual memory per process on x86 under linux, I believe NT has a similar or lower limit and SCO has (had?
For what it is worth, we do in-memory data mining and number crunching in our lab. We regularly have processes with 15GB of virtual memory allocated (of course we're not swapping that much; we may be crazy but we're not stupid =-). For these purposes I love the Alphas. I have no knowledge about web serving, database serving, etc, from Alphas.
-Paul Komarek
I hear ya bro. If that weren't true, we'd all be running NeXTSTEP on 10 GHz Alphas right now....
Hmmm... It use AMD 761 chipset - so does that means if someone really wanted to they can hack the KT266A, etc and make these motherboard to work with both Alpha and Athlon?! I bet if you have the right socket on the motherboard and the right BIOS you can just swap the CPU in and you have a cheap and cheerful Alpha system......
Shame that it has come too late. Long live Athlon!
This pleases me a lot. I have a PC164 Ruffian system at home running Debian and I've been really happy with it. I got a 56k ISA modem working in it as well... it's a really great system. It's quite impressive that a machine that is 4 years old can crunch a seti unit in under 8 hours.
Once I get some money together, I'd happily get another Samsung alpha machine for unixy things.
Woo! Alpha powered computer on nForce hardware? ;)
Seriously, if this turns out to be true, and within a year, then this could popularise the Alpha a bit, especially with Linux users who don't need x86! This is, of course, assuming that the processor is reasonably priced.
Alpha has always lacked a consumer level CPU, which has affected it when it comes to workstations and PCs. They have been powerhouses with 4/8MB L2 cache off-chip, etc, but if they had at each stage made a cheaper chip with 512KB L2 cache, or 256KB on-die L2 cache, especially if it was pin/slot compatible with Athlon processors, then the uptake of the processor would have been a lot higher. IMO, of course!
The world's most reliable OS? Last time I checked
there was no USB support in VMS, but it was supposed to come in a follow up to V7.3. So will the SamSung machine boot VMS? That would be nice, taking me back to the PC150 21064 Jensen days with OpenVMS and DECWindows on the desktop - if only.
> Porche
It's "Porsche", not "Porche".
At the risk of being moderated redundant:
:-)
I still must express my unabashed joy at seeing that Alpha is not going to go the way of the dinosaur. It's a wonderful chip. Diversity in products available to us compu geeks is most assuredly a good thing. This announcement is a glimmer of hope in an otherwise almost completely wintel world
Typing this on a 733 P3 which will get spanked by the 533 Alpha (164) easily, in basically anything (exceptions, such as running x86 byte code don't count, but I can do it, and basically the same speed vs a 400-500 mhz x86 box.), same applies to the athlons next to me (850s and 900s). Until x86 hits 2x MHz for 164s, the alphas will beat them, or be of similar performance, and x86 only starts winning anything at about 1.5x (2 vector tests (integer, but not sure of who's integer, I will wager it is the athlon's)).
Ramblings of an Alpha-geek. PS. Anyone remember the whole anti-trust issue when dec sold it's aging fabs, and the strongarm to intel, which I believe stated that intel had to make chips (Intel claimed they couldn't (claimed it was to complicated for their fabs), but there was NO evidence they ever tried.) and that there was some restriction on intel trying to go after alphas. (not quite sure what the last part was)
Samsung should sort out its web site and provide useful information. Then I could start taking the company seriously...
Try following the "What we sell" link...
p ha _cpu/product_guide/where_index.html
Samsung doesn't seem to sell very much!
http://samsungelectronics.com/semiconductors/al
Hmmm....??
How can you say it'll run linux when it won't run the latest RedHat?
No, the EV68 has been out for quite some time, and it is in fact shipping in Wildfires as of recently at 1GHz. The technologies you're referring to are coming in the EV7 (21364), not due out for over a year, IIRC.
FYI - All Alpha CPUs are EV-something.
Cheers,
CigarBuff
Ahem. If the best techonologies won, we wouldn't be running Nextstep on Alpha, we would be running Genera on Alpha. Oh wait. We can do that. Now, if only Symbolics would drop the price of OpenGenera, and if only they hadn't dumped the S-Graphics unit. Nichimen/WingedEdge/izware/current name of the month seem to be making a real mess of what should be some kick butt products.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
In order to be useful most applications, etc. have to be compiled with the least common denominator- period. This translates into something that will not assume that you've got seperate pipelines for execution for the FP and MMX/3DNow type instructions because they want it to run on all those K6-2/3's and Pentium MMX/II machines as well as the Pentium III machines. Backwards compatibility's a double-edged sword.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas