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XP1000 Workstation
Anonymous Coward writes "Compaq is announcing new workstations and servers based on the 21264 microprocessor. They run Linux and they scream (specFP of 58.7). Compaq
" The web cast requires registration. Hopefully, cypherpunks/cypherpunks has been set up already. Anyway, that is one fast chip, and a bit pricey, too - over US$7000 for
a low-end NT model, or almost $10,000 for a Tru64 Unix model. On a related note, a friend is about to go off to college and
has about five grand to blow on a nice Alpha for NT and Linux. Any suggestions for him?
Don't buy a $5000 machine. What the hell does
a student need a server class workstation for
anyway?
If you are doing such heavy research that you need that kind of power, get your school to buy the machine for the lab. That's what I did.
If it's a personal machine, why bother? Get an x86 box. Cheaper hardware, more choices, more software, more support, etc...
It's like an 18 year old slashdoter having a quad xeon on his desk. A waste of the hardware and a waste of money, all so that a geek can feel that his dick is big.
- 16-bit WCHAR
- 32-bit int
- 32-bit long
- 64-bit pointer
- 64-bit _long64
Oh fuck. They encourage the assumption that a long is 32 bits. They claim that this will help everyone, because everyone always assumed that anyway.And the price on those systems are... ?
get a $2500 pc and spend the rest on software. Software for a workstation costs just as much as the workstation
buy a nice car and get layed for once in your life
Jeeze, spend 2500-3000 on a nice dual pII & use the rest for wiskey & women.
Get a nice 21" monitor.
You'll still be able to drive a car when the rest of us poor geeks are totally friggin blind!
As for computing hardware, stay BEHIND the power curve!
Don't most universities prohibit commercial use of their network?
The added bonus to this idea is that at the end you'll have 4 machines, which is always more fun than having one. You can network them, cluster them, and prollyget more power for your money than the Alpha will be worth in 4 years.
He might have one or more of a thousand good reason for wanting an alpha. Including development for an alpha. Lot's of ways to use a fast computer to make chump-change in college-- beats work-study at the library.
or spend $120 on an AIWA BOLT drive. 10GB compressed on tape.
Since the computer is for college, he can probably wait until the K7 is out. I believe they borrowed the bus from an alpha, which runs at 200MHz! Couple some of the advantages of Alpha, 3DNOW, and "not buying intel", and you've got a WINNER!!
Of course it is about penis size. A p5-133 would make a perfectly good web server for dozens of virtual sites! The only reason to buy a high end workstation like that is if you're modelling scientific data. Either that or you have too much money to throw around.
No, he is quite correct. As far as I can see there is no Netscape Navigator or Communicator for the Linux-Alpha platform. Sure, you can probably get Mozilla to build, but I wouldn't even use that on x86 since it's incredibly unstable and useless. Good luck getting it to even compile. Best bet is to get digital unix libs and run the digital unix binary.
Backups are for wussies. ;-) If I gather more than 650 megs of compressed data in my home directory I'll write it to a CD and store it away.. if I have more then that then it is time to start sifting through the crap and deleting stuff because 90% of it is garbage anyway. As for the rest of the system.. who cares? Backup /etc, /usr/local, and /var perhaps which maybe amounts to at MOST 600 megs (again, easily fits on a CD). If the inevitable happens, reinstall with a fresh OS and copy the needed files off the CD-rom. No need to fuss around with lame tape drives.
Before you comment on the I/O subsystem of the
e rs/ECG0500199.pdf
:)
compaq XP1000 I think you should go and look
at the specs fisrt.
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/supportinformation/pap
You will notice that this system has a 2.6 GB/s
connection to memory (not the 800MB/s on a PII)
It also has independent 32bit and 64bit PCI bus
I prefer the 264DP motherboard (Dual), but this
system is not shabby. and compared to PII/Zeon
workstations from dell or any top name house,
This system is acually cheaper.
Go price out a workstation at dell and see what
you get
The only thing lacking in this system is a high
end Video subsystem (like on the SGI VPC), but
the good thing is you can go out and get the
perfect high end 3D solution, and plug it right
in, say like one of those Intergraphies.
Souped up with one of thoose this system will
rock any SGI VPC since you get great 3D horsepower
and also CPU/FP/INT power as well, and onlike
the VPC, Programs on this system can actually use
the bandwith on the system bus.
Is someone kind enough to set this user up on all sites, is it a built in default, or something else? What gives????
Tell your friend to stick to Intel, unless he's getting his graduate subatomic physics degree.
...the words above say it all, my friends.
-Dan
Fix your car yourself and buy your furniture from a second hand store. You can buy a car repair manual like Chilton's (did I spell that right?) at an auto parts place. Mechanics are generally either incompetent of dishonest but you won't realize this until you start fixing your own damn car.
Hey dumbfuck, there is a difference in being a loser and being poor. I was very poor when I went through college, now I put $800 a week into an index fund. Only an idiot born with a silver spoon in his mouth would squader $5K on a silly toy like an Alpha computer while in college. An x586 200 Mhz would be just as effective at getting college work done. An alpha is an overpowered toy for the vast majority of people - if he is doing some serious mathematics at a graduate level that would otherwise take weeks to finish it may be worthwhile.
No it is not 2x what a VPC costs. Don't be fooled
:).
:)
.25 ~450 18 13 .25 ~550 22 15 .18 ~800 32 24
.35 ~600 33 69 .28 ~800 44 92 .18 ~1200 67 139
by the starts at $1 marketing gimick.
Go an use the system builder and see what
it gives you.
Here is an example
for a VPC 320 with
450mhz PII (not zeon)
128MB
9.1GB SCSI (7.2k, close to 4.6 at 10k)
is $5155
And since you can't even get a VPC 540 yet,
one can only guess what the price will be
if you just take the cost of the cpu into
consideration
450mhz PII ~ $400
450mhz PII zeon/2MB ~ $4000
Now add just the cost of the cpu to price above
and you get a system that cost about $8500 vs
the XP1000 at $7100 now toss in the high end
3D graphics for ~ $2500 and you end up with
an XP1000 that costs about $9600.
A system, I venture to guess, that will be much
better for more tasks than just 3D games
you can use the FP horsepower to do ray-tracing
in real time and display the images on you
bad ass 3D card. Instead of waiting a couple of
minutes while a render farm of 21164 alpha's
do the job
And if you look into the future for an upgrade
path on the VPC, you are basically limited to
future shrink of the P6. i.e PIII and coppermine
The same is true of the XP1000 but future
shrinks of the 21264 are quite inticing.
Now lets do some simple performance scaling
(Mhz is max in process, Samsung is selling
600mhz 21264 processors now check out
www.alpha-processor.com)
Processor Process Mhz SpecInt SpecFP
PII
PIII
(cumine)
21264(EV6)
21264(EV67)
21264(EV68)
EV68 should appear sometime late in Q499 or Q100
So to protect you investment in hardware the
XP1000 is not a bad machine.
An intresting fact about this timeline is that
if you still want to run you x86 stuff with
NT5 (aka W2k, with fx!32 built in), and say the
translation hit is 50% native performace
(This is true of fx!32 v1.4, v2 in NT5 might be
better)
then a 1.2ghz ev68 should have a spec peformance
of about
EV68 (on translated x86 code)
33 specint 70 specfp
That's higher performance than even an 800mhz!
coppermine!
So if you run linux/are not wed currently to x86
hardware, the XP1000 is a good bet.
the VPC is not bad, but I like the XP1000 better.
Why?
The VPC is an NT machine.
Why not compare XP1000 NT with VPC NT
Thats a plus on the XP1000 side.
i.e you can run a mission critical OS.
Check out www.dcginc.com and www.harddata.com, they have the best prices (and most highly recommended) companies to buy an end-user, workstation variety Alpha from. Don't buy one from Dig^H^H^HCompaq, you will pay way, way too much.
:)
:)
Probably a 500MHz 21164 would be more than ample for your friend. That is more powerful by a bit than PII-400/450 on integer, and a lot more powerful on floating point. And the price for those machines stripped this summer was $1.5k, and should have dropped by now even further with the release of 21264. You should be able to build a nice system for under $2k.
The biggest advantage of Alphas over Intels is you break free of Intel's strangle hold on the PC market, you get a neat sounding machine, and it is still compatible with most PCI (and some ISA) cards. Not to mention, a PII-xxx sounds like just another old PC, but a Alpha Workstation inspires awe in your friends, especially Linux people who know what Alphas are. Basically they make cool, powerful (esp FP), Linux boxes!
PS. The XPS1000 and the dual 21264 machines look nice, but a bit underpowered. I think I will wait for the quad 21264 before I lay any money down.
-------------------------------
"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." - Phil. 1:21 (KJV)
Did I not read of $250 Samsung 533Mhz Alpha's here a while ago? Why does not some company make a *cheap* Alpha/Linux server?
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
Don't waste your money on a computer. Spend less than 2 grand on the computer to get 95% of the capability that you would get spending that 5 grand, and use the rest of your money for something really interesting, like travel, books, internet service, etc.
of course, a DU license is about $2k (I believe) so that's part of the difference, but there's also the gotcha that NT only runs at 32-bit on these guys..
cheers,
-o
That is very application-dependent. Don't try running the
MM5 meteorology model on a Sun, unless you want a hindcast instead of a forecast! Our benchmarks indicate that while our air pollution models run fine on Crays, DEC^H^H^HCompaq Alphas, SGIs, or Suns, the meteorology model runs reasonably only on the first 3. (Actually, we find that a 2-year-old 21164/400 machine matches the rest without even going to the latest 600+ MHz 164's or to the 264's)
For air pollution forecasts, have a look at this.
fwiw
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
They had can had for a song, some of the Indy, Indigo2 and O2 models.
Buying a $5000 computer is daft.
21" monitor and overclocked celeron is better than an O2K with cheap monitor, and it depreciates a LOT slower.
Spend the remainder (c.$3000) on 1 year put option on MS. You'll then have at least $5000 left to spend on a computer next year.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
A backup device that can handle the average drive size these days is pretty pricey.
I say buy a PC for 1-2 grand and a DDS-3 tape drive for another grand. The tape drive will serve your needs for five years and more, the rest of the system will seem clunky after two.
A CD-RW might work, but I'd go with the tape-- the media can be written a larger number of times, and 600MB for the CD just doesn't compare to the 12 GB on tape.
There are too many students out there who neglect backup entirely.
Oh, and buy a good monitor. Lesser monitors degrade sharply after 2-3 years.
I have a 12 cassette DAT autoloader I bought for $300 from an auction site. It's DDSI, so I can use the cheapest possible tapes with it. Just pop in the magazine and come back the next morning...
http://www.swt.com/alpha_linux.html
I'm probably going to get myself one of
these within a month...
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- DCG Inc.
- Install PVM on 2 of their $2,200 boxes (533mhz, IDE) and spend the extra on ups+disk+ram
- Get the $4,300 "cool box" (UX-667mhz, 4mb-cache, SCSI).
- Microway
Remember: Intel is the question -- Alpha is the answer.Great service, good prices. (story follows)
I ordered myself a UX-600mhz (intergrated scsi+ether) for x-mas (last minute). The day after confirmation, they called back with news that (due to the holiday) 2mb-UX boards would be out of stock for a time. Instead of saying "Thanks for the money, you can wait a few weeks", Steve (the owner) offered me an LX (more expensive) + SCSI controller and ate the cost difference.
I can't make any promises that they'll do the same for you, but that experience alone impressed the hell out of me.
Anyway, if I had $5,000 to spend on hardware now, I'd either:
No personal experience here, but they're always running specials... that and everyone's heard of them.
If you really want to chomp on data, try one of their quadputer cards (I've always wanted to...)
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
Okay, first, you can get a nice 533 MHz 21164 LX workstation for about half this- best prices I've seen are from DCG. Add options as you would for an Intel(-compatible), but beware, a lot of hardware doesn't work for Alpha, esp. video cards.
However, does your friend really want an alpha? It is getting more mature constantly, but should really be considered a beta platform. The big problem is that there's an awful lot of code written assuming pointers and ints are the same size, but Alpha's 64-bit pointers of course are not. So there is no Netscape, no WordPerfect, a good Mozilla hasn't been built since last July, GNOME and KDE have both had lots of 64-bit problems which showed up in Alpha and (I think) Sparc64 and nowhere else. About one in three kernels builds out-of-box (~1/3 don't build, ~1/3 don't boot), and until very recently, XFree86 had numerous common behaviors which crashed it. (However, there is an Applix for Linux/Alpha which I've heard is great.)
I use Alpha because of the awesome floating performance for my particular apps. I've heard memory bandwidth (~50% above 450 Mhz PII) makes it a slightly better price/performance web server too- but don't quote me. For everything else, it's really not any faster than a same-priced PII, and because of 64-bit problems, count on even good open-source code to be buggy or even unusable, or you will be disappointed.
OTOH, if you're up for the adventure or want the floating-point power and want to help make Linux work on the next generation of hardware, by all means go for it!
"...the firmament sheweth his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1)
Firmament Science and Engineering
Standing on the Solid St
"How come I'm reading your message in Navigator 4.5 on Alpha Linux?"
How come it freezes on me after an average of about 1 minute? (Yes, I followed the FAQ at AlphaLinux to the letter.)
"...the firmament sheweth his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1)
Firmament Science and Engineering
Standing on the Solid St
Like me- I'll use it to pay off my F***** loans that I got because I didn't have an extra 5 grand to blow on a computer. Get real.
I think you'll find that while the FP performance on an Alpha is exceptional the I/O subsystem is really not much better than a PC until you buy a high end system. This means that if you're running CPU intensive applications which require little I/O throughput to disk or network subsystems the Alpha is a good choice. But if you're looking for heavy transaction processing, like with a huge database connected to a web server, a Sun E4000 or E3500 is going to provide significantly better performance (even single CPU).
The Alpha may have been the first 64 bit CPU to come to market, but given similar L2 cache sizes and reasonably modern hardware, it's not really that much better than an UltraSPARC or high end PowerPC based AS/400 system for serious number crunching. And the IBM AS/400 and Sun E3500/4000/10000 systems just eat it's lunch for raw I/O.
Spend $2000 on some decent computer (PPC, i386).
Put it together if you want to feel good about
yourself.
Take the other $3000 and plan a trip around the
world.
----- obSig
they could be doing 3d graphics in 3dsmax or maya... which really does need all the power you can throw at it.
Somebody get our flag back!
http://torlacubus.bloomnet.com/katala/slashdot.htm
You'll be amazed!
Caching is not enabled on the reverse proxy, so all requests get passed through to the 386. Plus, the counter.dll is on the 386, so all of the counter hits had to be done by the 386 as well.
/. effect! I got over 70000 hits just TODAY! Wow! Cool! I freaked when I saw that!
Man, talk about
Now I dread a call from @home saying "I'm sorry, but you've been using too much bandwidth with your 386, we are going to have to disconnect you" That would suck!
My suggestion: DONT buy a top of the line machine with the $5000. Buy a $1250 machine every year you are in college. In four years, even the best alpha will seem pathetic. Better to have a "pretty damn good" computer every year than a horribly obsolete one. You pay a huge premium for being ahead of the curve -- a $5000 system is not five times better than a $1000 system.
My thinkpad 380xd is sufficient for me. But I have peripherals out the ass...
;)
Remember, schools often have unix machines, so you do not have to buy one yourself.
A decent IBM Thinkpad can be had for ~1500.
Invest the rest in stocks
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
www.microway.com has some good specials on alphas.
Elijah Chancey www.elijahsadventure.com nomadic IT consultant, bicycling across america "all that you touch / and all
Think this goes back to the Guinness poll.. lemme see... how many cases of Guiness would $5K get us?
5 imacs... all the WAY.. :-)
(can sell them off at a profit to idiots on campus as an option)
a 18 year old needs a sever class workstation to host out his girlfriends webcam, and make his parents think that it's just a "normal" computer when they visit :)
It has nothing to do with the size of their damn dick!!!!!!
You guys must be living sheltered lives. With $5K I'd actually buy the books for my classes, stop skipping meals to save money, and maybe get basics for my apartment like a table, a chair, and a chest of drawers. I might even get my car repaired. I don't even own my own computer, and I've got enough other things to worry about paying for I won't even be thinking about buying one anytime soon.
Cheers, Bill
AFAIK the only difference between the $5k NT workstations and the $10k Unix workstations is software and the support contract. I could be wrong about this, though. Compaq provides a handy utility that lets you work out the cost of various system configurations. Fill in their information form and they'll point you to the appropriate web pages.
I've been playing with Compaq's system configuration/pricing tool.
14 processor GS140 -> about $800k US.
4 processor 8400 5/625 -> about $400k US.
4 processor 8200 5/625 -> about $200k US.
The one irritating flaw in the tool is that it says "see dealer" for most workstation prices.
I'm told that it is more cost effective to build something like a Beowulf cluster of alpha workstations than to buy a server, as long as you are running calcaulations that can be easily split up and don't saturate the network with communications traffic.
The 21264 machines start at $7119, with 128 MB RAM and 4.3 GB disk. That's with Windows NT, but you can always return that for a refund, right?
.I spent about $2300 US for a 533MHz UX with almost all the trimmmings (monitor not included) at Hard Data Ltd. (www.harddata.com) They're in Canada but they ship UPS 3day select and will work with you to find the system you always wanted.
Take a looooonnngg vacation :)
LOL
Just Hit enter, no username, no password...
" It is running on the worst of all worlds: A Packard Bell 386sx/25 with 8 megs RAM, running reverse-proxied behind a Microsoft IIS 4.0 machine."
Wouldn't that mean IIS 4.0 it taking all the hits, and the Win95 machine only gets one if the page has changed? Meaning the Win95 machine, is basically, doing nothing all the time? Just a thought...
:P
heres what i would do with $5G
a) by an awesome DELL/IBM Laptop (366mhz) and penguinize it. ($4500 for a really nice one)
b) get a $2000 Comp (p3 when its out) and a great sony 21" monitor for like $1700.
c) buy a nice comp for like $3000 and use the $2000 for some fun..
my ideaz,
AJ
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