[geeks] w00t! AlphaServer SMP goodness

[Jochen Kunz]

On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 05:39:29PM -0500, dave at cca.org wrote:

> Which reminds me - how well does gcc handle alpha's word-oriented
> memory interface? Compared to DEC's compilers?
I suspect much worse. I have two Alphas with identical CPU: 
500 MHz 21164 EV56. A Personal Workstation 500au and a PC164 OEM
board. The first runs Tru64 the last NetBSD. All software that I 
installed on the PWS 500au is compiled with the DEC compiler, 
the NetBSD system is build with gcc. The same programms like 
gv / ghostscript "feel" slower on the NetBSD machine. Extemest 
example is Mozilla. Slow beyond usability on NetBSD. My first 
try with Mozilla on NetBSD-alpha was on a DEC 3000/600 with some 
NetBSD-1.6 release candidate and Mozilla 1.0. I could not start 
Mozilla in that confiuration: It spit lots and lots and lots of 
"unaligned access fault" errors. I never got it to display a window. 

To the original question, OS for an SMP Alpha machine: 
I recomend Tru64. Hobbyist license is $99 and you will get a very 
nice, highly BSDish Unix that can "Roll Big Rocks".
Or OpenVMS. 
-- 



tsch|_,
          Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz