HP Finally Reveals The Alpha Marvel

brejc8 writes "HP have revealed the new range of AlphaServer systems. The new EV7 processors show very reasonable performance figures. Revealed by the inquirer the 1GHz versions have very similar SPEC scores as the 1GHz Itanium 2 (INT_2000 of 875 and FP_2000 of 1,500). This is very intersting after HP were rumoured to ensure that "...no Alpha benchmark will be released until the Itanium platform(s) is/are faster"."

Comments

2-4 processor setups

[Cheeze]

dollar for dollar, x86 offerings will be much lower in price and support costs in the 2-4 processor setups. I think HP should team up with a company like Apple or Sun and start offering processors on the alpha platform that run the other company's software. Can anyone say OSX on EV7?

Re:2-4 processor setups

[pmz]

dollar for dollar, x86 offerings will be much lower in price and support costs in the 2-4 processor setups.

I'm not so sure about this anymore. I was very impressed recently when I saw the diagnostic output from a Sun workstation that had a failed component. The Sun workstation reported down to the chip where the system had failed (the information comes out of the serial port during POST). When time equals money, this sort of stuff is hard to beat.

x86 boxes usually require hair-pulling trial-and-error troubleshooting that makes one feel terrible about the time wasted. Conversely, with the Sun box, the admin basically said "oh, that's it" and called the vendor.