AXP vs VAX (was Re: Aaaaahhhh... 'Tis Good to be Back!!!)

From: Ethan Dicks <ethan_dicks_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Mar 22 08:00:25 2000

--- "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh_at_aracnet.com> wrote:
> Good Grief! The most any Alpha on my home cluster has is 112MB and my best
> Alpha only has 96MB because the RAM is so blasted expensive! I've found
> that a Alpha with 80MB is about the same as a VAX with 16MB, and don't even
> consider DECwindows in less than 80MB (and you won't see good performance
> till 112MB).

Ow... that's scary. I am in the process of _finally_ building up this AXP133
"no-name" board I bought a few years ago. Currently, it has 64Mb because
parity
16Mb SIMMs are stunningly expensive. I lucked out at the Dayton Computerfest
a couple of weeks ago and cleaned a vendor out at $15 per stick. Now my Alpha
has 64Mb, my LX will have 64Mb and even my main SPARC-IPX. It's been a
memorable experience. ;-)

The Alpha has on it an older version of NetBSD. I'm considering upping it
to the latest rev or going to RedHat. At the moment, I can't seem to get
the 3C509 working, but I'd rather use something a little more advanced like
a Tulip-based 10/100 NIC or even a 3C905C (since we have them around the
office).

One other piece of fun with this "no-name" board was locating compatible
cache RAM. I stripped several 486s before I found a set of chips that
would let the Alpha come up. The manual mentions a list of preferred
vendors. Believe it.

-ethan


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Received on Wed Mar 22 2000 - 08:00:25 GMT

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