Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 09:14:46 -0700 (PDT) From: Dirk Kleinhesselink <djk@djk.saintl.com> To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Alpha 500a ok Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9907090907540.360-100000@djk.saintl.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> 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 Compaq has released for beta testing their Digital UNIX FORTRAN compiler ported to Linux/Alpha and this seems to be working pretty well, at least for me and for some of the people who've commented on it in the redhat-alpha list. Can Linux apps work on FreeBSD/alpha as they do for FreeBSD/386 ? I intend to try FreeBSD/alpha as soon as I can get my ARC based PC164 over to SRM. BTW the newest SRM recognizes and will boot from IDE drives, so I hope the FreeBSD/alpha developers can take advantage of this. OpenBSD will boot and install to IDE drives from SRM. Dirk To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.LNX.4.10.9907090907540.360-100000>