ALPHA 21164 Workstation

[Jeffrey Watts]

On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Mike McVey wrote:

> This system is a good 3-4 years old. What might it be worth? How would
> it stack up verses both a 400 dollar, "state of the art"  Celeron 400
> MHz EMachine with equal RAM or even a decent, brand new, consumer
> grade 550 MHz Pentium III?

The Celeron and PIII would kick it's hiney (maybe by almost a factor of
two) in almost anything. It's still a very nice system, though.

> Any known problems with using this system for linux? I understand that
> for both NT and Linux, applications are processor independent, and
> thus software written for either OS that runs on x86 systems will work
> on the Alpha too? But will Windows 98 Win32 applications work on an
> Alpha NT box?

Yes and no.  Some Unix apps are poorly written, and will misbehave on a
64-bit system like the Alpha.  Most will work great, though.  For a reason
why, look up "cast"ing, pointers, and long integers.

> What about drivers? Perhaps these will be hardware specific and thus I
> am at the mercy of the likely far smaller linux for alpha driver
> support than x86 linux drivers?

This Alpha is using PC hardware.  Linux should work great on it.

J.

o-----------------------------------o
| Jeffrey Watts                     |
| watts at jayhawks.net            o-------------------------------------o
| Systems Programmer            | "If you really want to impress      |
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