Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 03:44:11 -0400 (EDT) From: -Vince- <vince@penzance.econ.yale.edu> To: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade to my machine Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.950830034153.17081K-100000@penzance.econ.yale.edu> In-Reply-To: <199508300036.RAA04867@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>
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On Tue, 29 Aug 1995, Rodney W. Grimes wrote: > > > > 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 :-) You do have a point but it's when the reply comes that I think of something else to ask =) > > > > 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 :-). I guess so but it seems like even though a P5 can address up to 4GB of memory, they should make motherboards support that much memory so people can make their P5's power horses =) Cheers, -Vince- vince@kbrown.oldcampus.yale.edu - GUS Mailing Lists Admin UCLA Physics/Electrical Engineering - UC Berkeley Fall '95 SysAdmin bigbang.HIP.Berkeley.EDU - Running FreeBSD, Real UN*X for Free! Chabot Observatory & Science Center
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