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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."
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
Heh heh... I'd like to run FreeBSD on it. IIRC, it supports the Alpha.
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 I'll take the Porche over the outdated horsepower any day.
Comparisons like that are pointless when the only real factor is speed/$. It makes no difference when you can pay 25% of the price for same performance.
If you need 64-bit integers, huge amounts of RAM, very high-precision FP or large numbers of processors you'll want to avoid x86. But for the vast majority of applications there's little reason to go with anything else.
A bit OT:
I think the reason so many people are infatuated with Alpha is that the assembly code is 'clean' and the processor doesn't have backwards compatibility modes that require a little thinking to get around. The truth is, none of that matters when you need to get a job done.
Hands in my pocket
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.
Other Alpha systems are also not difficult to locate in eBay's Computer section. Just do a search on "alpha". The machines of interest aren't difficult to locate in the results, as there are rarely more than 4 pages' worth.
And the brethren went away edified.
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?
RISC architecture is far superior to x86, look at the performance of MAC compared to Intel.
Actually, that's a very good thing to look at. Clock-for-clock, the Power architecture is only about 20% faster than Intel. Of course, nothing lies like benchmarks, but that appears to be about the average case.
Or, for an example that is very popular here, Windows vs. Linux. Which is technically superior and which is most commonly used?
Depends on what you define as "technically superior". If you are talking about object integration with the operating system, Windows blows Linux (and Unix) out of the water. The flexibility of objects in Windows is its greatest strength. On the other hand, if you are talking about architecture, Unix is (possibly) superior primarily because of the very isolated nature of its components. The latter is also why Unix is generally more stable than Windows.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
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.