[geeks] w00t! AlphaServer SMP goodness

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 09:21:04PM +0100, Jochen Kunz wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 05:39:29PM -0500, dave at cca.org wrote:
> 
> > Which reminds me - how well does gcc handle alpha's word-oriented
> > memory interface? Compared to DEC's compilers?
> I suspect much worse. I have two Alphas with identical CPU: 
> 500 MHz 21164 EV56. A Personal Workstation 500au and a PC164 OEM
> board. The first runs Tru64 the last NetBSD. All software that I 
> installed on the PWS 500au is compiled with the DEC compiler, 
> the NetBSD system is build with gcc. The same programms like 
> gv / ghostscript "feel" slower on the NetBSD machine. Extemest 
> example is Mozilla. Slow beyond usability on NetBSD. My first 
> try with Mozilla on NetBSD-alpha was on a DEC 3000/600 with some 
> NetBSD-1.6 release candidate and Mozilla 1.0. I could not start 
> Mozilla in that confiuration: It spit lots and lots and lots of 
> "unaligned access fault" errors. I never got it to display a window. 

I don't know about NetBSD, but I've heard that binaries compiled with
the Digital compilers runs far better on linux/alpha than gcc compiled
binaries.   I don't know if the compilers actually run on linux though.  

There was a national lab that was running an Alpha/Linux cluster with 1
or 2 tru64 machines for compiling applications for the cluster.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd