[geeks] w00t! AlphaServer SMP goodness

[Eric Dittman]

> 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. 

One thing to remember is the PWS and the PC164 use different
chipsets.  The memory access speed is also different, and
the PC164 can bet set for 128- or 256-bit memory width, so
if it is set to 128-bit that will slow down memory access
also.
-- 
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net
Check out the DEC Enthusiasts Club at http://www.dittman.net/