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."

Comments

Intel bought the competitor, not technology

[leandrod]

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.

Dual boot?

[rice_burners_suck]

Heh heh... I'd like to run FreeBSD on it. IIRC, it supports the Alpha.

Clock speed question

[Michael Woodhams]

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.)

Re:Where to buy chip, mobo?

[CaptainCarrot]

There's a guy on eBay who sells older Alpha hardware. They're mostly build-it-yourself systems, though, and don't always conform to any standard PC formfactor, so YMMV greatly.

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.

Odd selection of features

[HalfFlat]

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?

Re:Alpha processors and abandonware

[Reality Master 101]

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.