Summary.
* Compaq says: we got a "record-setting" 63 minutes on the Pro/ENGINEER
Bench97 versus Sun's 77 minutes.
* Sun says: Compaq gets 63 in house but 101 when tested independantly
i.e., by "Pro/E: The Magazine" who invented the benchmark. Sun gets 59
in house, 77 independant.
* Me says: who gives a monkey's butt? The DEC Personal Workstation 500a
takes 55 minutes (independant or DEC). BTW: a guy from SunUK
recently claimed that Sun and DEC both take 51 minutes.
Take a look at:
http://www.proe.com/Benchmarks/Bench97/bench97_priceperform.html
If you move a 45 degree line (i.e., bang per buck) across from the
bottom left you hit, in order:
NTSI Alpha 500
DEC PW 500a
Maxvision AXP164
DEC PW 433a
The Sun/Intel/SGI entries are far behind in both speed and speed/$.
On the subject of speed/$, DCG (www.dcginc.com) finally have 533MHz
Alphas with synchronous RAM "available" instead of "real soon now",
for $4995 and they've dropped the price of 500MHz ones (with DRAM) to
$3995. Of course those have no screen and not enough RAM, but pretty
good nonetheless...
Just now some droid from Digital France called me to know if their
DE500 ethernet card works with Linux. "But of course". Apparently
more people want to buy PW's for Linux so DEC has relented and will
sell them sans WinNT. Yes! Yes! That rules!
Re: What are the main reasons machines go down
We installed Alpha Linux 2.0.30 on this machine 52 days ago, half a
dozen people have been hitting it hard for 52 days and the uptime is
52 days. I can't imagine why it would go down unless some day I get
sufficiently bored to decide to restart and switch on the kernel
option that recognises Intel binaries transparently so that I can type
"netscape" instead of "em86 netscape". The SunOS machine that serves
my WWW pages has been up since we switched it off and moved it into
the next building and switched it on again 140 days ago. Statistical
significance of two data points: about none.
JoeB wrote:
>My current
>favorite graphics card (although getting a bit long in the tooth) is the
>Matrox Millenium. Supports 1600x1200 at 65536 colors at 60Hz,
Yep, that's what I use, at 65.93Hz according to xvidtune.
The DEC monitor could do it at 75Hz if I knew the parameters for XFree :(
>dragging windows around is FAST, and I think you can get these for like $200.
A figure that stuck in my mind is $181, although that may depend on
whether you get the 175MHz or 220MHz version. BTW, over on the
AlphaNT group there are people complaining that with some Millenium
drivers NT gets stuck in a non-restartable state...
>How dare anyone charge $3000 for a graphics chip set???
Maybe they were inspired by SGI's marketing practices?
-- Rob.
PS: Rumour mill oblige:
fact = no one outside of DEC has even seen a 21264 Alpha yet.
old rumour = 21264 will reach 800MHz when it is shrunk in H1 1998.
new rumour = 21264 will reach 833MHz when it is shrunk in January 1998.