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Tru64 UNIX for Hobbyists: $99
Anonymous Coward writes "For those of you out there with Alpha hardware, it seems that Compaq is now offering its Tru64 UNIX to 'technology enthusiasts' for a mere $99." A heavily restricted (VERY non-GPL) license is attached to the deal, but it looks like it would be a nice combination toy and "teach yourself commercial UNIX at home" tool.
Yeah, yeah, I know: you're not a real old school hacker unless you were working on Unix before Unix bacame popular. Good for you.
I've only used Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Linux (and only written code for the last two), but frankly I'd much rather be using Linux than any of the above.
I've heard Unix admins gripe about non-standard Linux-isms, but is a BSD/SysV syntax mix really that much of a problem compared to compilers that default to K&R instead of ANSI C, and system calls that were created solely to make your Unix source code incompatible and lock in software developers?
And as for the quality of said systems... well, Solaris is pretty sweet, but AIX and HP-UX are dead as soon as someone finds a hole deep enough to bury the remains. I remember telling people how aggravating it was that you couldn't upgrade a shared library or program in Windows while it was in use... only to discover that HP-UX 10.20 had the same limitation, not to mention further bass-ackwards problems with dynamic linking.
And don't get me started on CDE. The idea that multiple massive software vendors collaborated to produce the best desktop environment they could, and came up with *CDE* anyway, boggles the mind.
Don't get me wrong, there's lots of things that commercial Unices have (64-way SMP, high availability clustering, more optimized compilers, etc.) that Linux has yet to catch up to. But just because they're too expensive for the unwashed masses doesn't mean they're always worth it.
The best fair metric for chip performance seems to remain SPECint95 and SPECfp95 (www.specbench.org).
By that metric, the fastest recorded RISC and CISC speeds (1 per architecture) are the following:
700 MHz 21264A Compaq AlphaServer GS60E:
39.1 SPECint95 / 68.10 SPECfp95 (or w/ minimum optimizations, 34.7 SPECint_base95 / 54.5 SPECfp_base95)
733 MHz Pentium III (i840) Intel:
35.6 SPECint95 / 30.4 SPECfp95 (no _base figures available, figures from Intel, not yet on SPEC website)
440 MHz PA-8500 HP N4000:
34.0 SPECint95 / 51.4 SPECfp95 (30.8 int_base / 48.7 fp_base)
450 MHz UltraSPARC-II Sun Ultra 60 Model 1450:
19.7 SPECint95 / 27.0 SPECfp95 (16.2 int_base / 23.90 fp_base)
300 MHz MIPS R12000 Origin 2000 2-way:
18.4 SPECint95 / 34.4 SPECfp95 (18.1 int_base / 30.1 fp_base)
340 MHz PowerPC RS64-II IBM H70:
16.0 SPECint95 / 21.2 SPECfp95 (13.7 int_base / 20.2 fp_base)
Thus the answer to your question is "Yes, Alpha remains the fastest", with the important caveat that the 10% performance advantage over Intel comes at a significantly higher price. All other RISCs are slower than the fastest Intel systems, at least in terms of uniprocessor integer performance, the best single predictor for most CPU-limited applications.
Note that Apple G4 performance, and performance of IBM's latest S80 (450 MHz Power RS-III) aren't discussed by their respective vendors. If you extrapolated the G4 performance from the mildly similar 340 MHz Power RS-II, performance of a 500 MHz part would be around 23.53 SPECint with SPECfp at 31.8. IBM's Power PC 604e parts have slightly lower integer performance and much lower floating point performance at the same clock rates as the RS-II (375 MHz 604e runs 15.1 SPECint, 10.1 SPECfp,) so even if there are some other G4 improvements, I doubt the 500 MHz G4 will be beating a 733 MHz Pentium III.
Note that these benchmarks don't measure performance of vector-processing chip features like MMX used by a few apps like Photoshop.
--LP
P.S. (Sidebar: The minimal performance value-add of RISC over Intel is is why I think Linux's highly touted multi-architecture support for RISCs is exactly a glowing scalability feature as some apparently make it. I guess 64-bits and floating point comes in handy for a few apps. Other than that, it's a nice plus for legacy hardware that grows less relevant by the day. )