Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 21:16:46 +0100 (BST) From: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> To: Dirk Kleinhesselink <djk@djk.saintl.com> Cc: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Alpha 500a ok Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9907092114430.43222-100000@herring.nlsystems.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9907090907540.360-100000@djk.saintl.com>
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On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Dirk Kleinhesselink wrote: > > > > 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 ? The Linux emulator has not yet been ported. It shouldn't be a huge job though. > 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. Current snapshots don't include the ATA drivers needed for this. It might be a case of just adding the drivers to GENERIC but I'm not sure if sysinstall understands the ATA driver (it should). -- Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com Nonlinear Systems Ltd. Phone: +44 181 442 9037 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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