Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 11:08:58 +0200 From: Rainer =?iso-8859-1?Q?Frohnh=F6fer?= <rfrohn@ibm.net> To: Mark Holloway <mholloway@flashmail.com>, alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Alpha 500a ok? Message-ID: <37846AAA.8AF6EEBE@ibm.net> References: <000c01bec8ed$1dd8bba0$eb3bea18@lvcm.com>
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Mark Holloway wrote:
> Hi FreeBSD/Alpha people..[snip]Some people have asked me why I'm
> looking at Alpha and not Intel. Right now I have an Intel/FreeBSD
> machine at home and it works great. However, I've always looked for
> the best "bang for the buck" and $1400 is a pretty low price to pay
> for the Alpha and I feel the components are built better. The SpecINT
> on the Alpha 500 is still higher than any other used RISC based
> machine in this price range (Sparc 20, SGI Indy, all with SpecINT
> around 2.5 -> 4.5). Does anyone know of any issues or quirks with the
> Alpha 500a machines? Or are they pretty stable?
One word on the Spec* benchmarks: I guess the quoted numbers are the
ones published by DEC. They probably used their highly polished compiler
to produce the benchmark binaries --- on DEC OSF/1 a.k.a. True64 or what
they changed the name to. On Net/FreeBSD you'll have to rely on the
gcc/egcs family of compilers whose optimization for Alpha is less than
perfect. At least, it was like that until gcc2.8.1 (I lost track of
recent development). So, if you really get the best 'bang for the buck'
is questionable.
Any better information on that? I haven't seen any good benches for
Alpha/Linux or *BSD recently.
For myself, I'd go with the Alpha every day, just because it's got more
style, but that's a different story.
-Rain.
--
"To save energy
the light at the end of the tunnel
will temporarily be switched off."
(I don't employ for my speaker)
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