Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 00:00:03 -0500 (CDT) From: Tony Kimball <alk@pobox.com> To: freebsd@atipa.com Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PPro vs PII Message-ID: <13720.27283.95382.801320@compound.east> References: <13720.5928.221514.597576@compound.east> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980629212119.9695C-100000@altrox.atipa.com>
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I'll move this to chat. Quoth Atipa on Mon, 29 June: : : You can use up to 8 Xeons simultaneously. You can have a box off-the-shelf with 64 USparc too. Heck, look at ASCI Red -- it proves by demonstration that you can buy a box to use up to 9152 PPros simultaneously -- if you don't mind some funky address space structure:) : > ...Samsung... : : That would be nice. I am worried about the future of Alphas at this : point... No fear! Merced got delayed *again*, (and probably will a couple more times before I retire to Costa Rica) and Alpha is the *only* commodity 64-bit platform (outside the embedded world) -- since I can't count USparc as commodity, even if it is at commodity pricing levels, as long as it is single-source. Merced might not dent the market appreciably until 2003! By which time Alpha and USparc will have dominated the large database world very nicely. If Compaq pushes Alpha in the Fortune 1000 server space like they say they will, and Samsung is producing Alphas at competetive-market pricing, and every EDA engineer on the planet would kill his boss in order to swap his Klamath/NT desktop box for an Alpha/Linux box (and a few disgruntled, newly promoted ones may start doing so in fact RSN -- if only metaphorically), Alpha is sitting prettier than any other ISA going. Remember -- x86 can only lose share at this point, not gain. Heck, every time SGI makes another management blunder, and that's about every 60 seconds lately, a few hundred more Alphas are, in effect, sold. Intel doesn't even have to lose share for Alpha to grow (although they will) -- there is a lot of consolidation going on in the Workstation (and by implication, the ISA) space. HP really should start feeling it's age before long. If they didn't have such unrealistic market cap, hung over from the mainframe days, they would have been bought by Dell or some such nouveau riche chop shop long ago. I'd feel pretty good buying Alpha hardware right about now if only there was an upgrade roadmap. (That's always been the illusory carrot motivating hobbyist hardware choices -- historically favoring intel -- hasn't it? Modular upgrades, carrying over hardware from generation to generation.) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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