Date: Tue, 29 Aug 1995 17:36:58 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> To: vince@penzance.econ.yale.edu (-Vince-) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade to my machine Message-ID: <199508300036.RAA04867@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.91.950829044501.17081T@penzance.econ.yale.edu> from "-Vince-" at Aug 29, 95 04:47:19 am
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> > On Tue, 29 Aug 1995, Michael Smith wrote: > > > -Vince- stands accused of saying: > > > > Depends on what you're doing, as far as I can tell. I'll have a clearer > > > > picture when the new box (P100) comes in, and I can get some comparative > > > > numbers against the low-end (-66) alphas around here. > > > > > > Hmmm, okay... I meant a Alpha 275Mhz compared to a P5-90... > > > > There are a few of those around here too, but it's kinda hard to get > > realistic number off them, as they're rather busy most of the time. > > Hmmm, can a FreeBSD machine handle as big of a load as the Alpha? You seem to ask a lot of these types of questions, perhaps you should write 1 email message asking 20 of them, instead of creating these one and two at a time iterative question cycles :-) > > > I know what you mean but memory is still limited to 256 megs or > > > less so there is no way you can have 1 gig of physical ram I think... > > > > On what? No reason why you can't have several GB of physical memory > > if you happen to want it. There may not be any Intel PCI chipsets > > that support it (yet), but there's no hard law-of-physics limit > > that applies there; there are certainly plenty of GB+ memory > > machines kicking around. > > I mean on Intel PCI Chipsets since even ftp.cdrom.com only has > 128 megs of RAM and you need to use swap somehow even on servers since I > haven't really seen anyone with a server with more the 256 megs of memory > yet... Contact the Severs business unit of Intel Corporation, they can sell you Pentium based SMP boxes that can have up to 1G of physical memory, these are known as ``Extended Express'' series servers. Similiar products are avaliable from ALR, AST, NCR and a few others. These are very expensive back room types of Pentium servers sporting things like ECC memory, set associative write back caches per CPU chip, vendor specific CPU/Memory backplanes with PCI/EISA peripheral buses. I believe a recent Unix Review had an article on the ALR box, it is one of the more cost effective server class machines around right now. The chipset used in the Extended Express products from Intel is OEM'ed to at least 4 companies (whom, due to NDA's I can not mention) that use them to build servers, though I have never seen these products on the open market. The chipset itself can support 4G of physical address space, the 1G limit has been a memory density vs number of slots for memory cards tradeoff done by system designers. I would suspect that with next years memory density increase these boxes will sport 4G memory capacities, but then, we will also have P6 next year in volume :-). -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD
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