From owner-freebsd-alpha Fri Jul 9 0: 2:10 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from out1.ibm.net (out1.ibm.net [165.87.194.252]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A5B4214BDB for ; Fri, 9 Jul 1999 00:02:06 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from rfrohn@ibm.net) Received: from ibm.net (slip139-92-2-145.eh.de.ibm.net [139.92.2.145]) by out1.ibm.net (8.8.5/8.6.9) with ESMTP id HAA288742; Fri, 9 Jul 1999 07:01:58 GMT Message-ID: <37846AAA.8AF6EEBE@ibm.net> Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 11:08:58 +0200 From: Rainer =?iso-8859-1?Q?Frohnh=F6fer?= Reply-To: rfrohn@ibm.net Organization: I'm not organized at all X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mark Holloway , alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Alpha 500a ok? References: <000c01bec8ed$1dd8bba0$eb3bea18@lvcm.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message