[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[Jochen Kunz]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 21:25:46 +0200
Michael-John Turner <mj at turner.org.za> wrote:

> Anything against Alphas?
Nothing. Got infected with the DEC virus by VAXen I now own [mumble] six
Alphas. (And two PDP-11 and 15 or so VAXen.) From a small DEC3000-300X
to a big AS2100.

> I know MHz-for-MHz they're not as fast as PA-RISC machines,
The 500 MHz EV56 PWS 500au is as fast as a 240 MHz PA8200 C240.

> but they have good support from the open source OSes
> and one can use commodity PCI video cards with them (cards that are
> supported by XFree86/x.org).
The problem is to get a fast enough Alpha. I own a PWS 500au. I used it
for two years as primary workstation. (With Tru64, NetBSD didn't support
decent graphics on Alpha back then.) The PWS 500au is as fast as the
300 MHz R12k Octane I am sitting in front of right now. The PWS 500au is
my fastest Alpha. I would need an 1 GHz EV68 Alpha to get a real speed
boost. These machines are still rare and expensive.

For my current NetBSD hacking I simply need more raw compute power.
Right at this moment I have to wait an other hour for a kernel compile
to finish. Thats why I even think about extreme solutions like a
PeeCee. :-(

I may get a Sun E3k5. Not faster per CPU, but kernel comiles scale good
on multiple CPUs and E3k5 usually has multiple CPUs. ;-)

> Just tossing the idea out there as I've recently acquired an
> AlphaServer 800 (my first decent-ish Alpha - a 500Mhz EV5) and I'm
> pretty happy with it. Heck, even Firefox 1.5 is fairly stable on
> NetBSD 3.0 (strangely, it doesn't seem any less stable than on an x86
> system).
What graphic card are you using? I have two spare Matroc G200 but last
time I tried I was not successfull to get them running in the PWS 500au.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

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