Date: Sun, 01 Dec 1996 15:12:45 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: jehamby@lightside.com Cc: Mark Mayo <mark@quickweb.com>, Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu>, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD/Alpha (was Re: COMDEX trip report) Message-ID: <19551.849481965@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 01 Dec 1996 11:24:05." <199612011925.LAA18010@covina.lightside.com>
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> to consumers. In other words, I'm more excited about PowerPC then > I've ever been. Well, all I can say is that I hope your confidence is rewarded! :-) If I'm annoyed with the PowerPC folks, it's mostly because I also had high hopes for this challenge to Intel's hegimony and was disappointed when that camp failed to live up to even 50% of its own sales hype. Let's see if they can turn it around. If they do, I'll be more than happy to change my pessimistic tune. > I am 100% convinced that Be chose the right CPU with the PowerPC. > The name of the game is not performance, but price/performance, when > four commodity CPU's can be used to outperform a single high-end > Alpha, at a lower total pri ce. Be could have chosen Alpha, but I > still believe the lack of a second-source i s going to keep volume > low, and price high. I'm not sure that this will remain true either, however, and it may be the ultimate test of the BeOS concept to see if it scales to other platforms. Most of the ALPHA based machines I've seen show great promise as a technology which can pick from the best of both worlds - they can leverage off of cheap and readily available PCI components while still taking the "high road" in their choices of which of those components to use, thus avoiding much of the "PC nightmare" of aging legacy machines which are a bitch to support. As soon as DEC's price drops on MBs and CPUs hit the street, it's all down to commodity pricing for the rest, and that's a very interesting thought. Jordan
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