[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[Michael-John Turner]

On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 10:46:03PM +0200, Jochen Kunz wrote:
> Nothing. Got infected with the DEC virus by VAXen I now own [mumble] six
> Alphas. (And two PDP-11 and 15 or so VAXen.) From a small DEC3000-300X
> to a big AS2100.

Heh. I only have one VAX (a VS3100) and my other Alpha, an AS2100, is dead
at the moment.

> The 500 MHz EV56 PWS 500au is as fast as a 240 MHz PA8200 C240.

Yes, was quite surprised to hear that. I've heard that PA-RISC CPUs offer
good performance, but didn't realise they were that fast. My only HP is a
lowly B132L, running OpenBSD (still, a nice machine).

> The problem is to get a fast enough Alpha. I own a PWS 500au. I used it
> for two years as primary workstation. (With Tru64, NetBSD didn't support
> decent graphics on Alpha back then.) The PWS 500au is as fast as the
> 300 MHz R12k Octane I am sitting in front of right now. The PWS 500au is
> my fastest Alpha. I would need an 1 GHz EV68 Alpha to get a real speed
> boost. These machines are still rare and expensive.

Yes, that is true - fast Alphas still command a premium on the used market.

> For my current NetBSD hacking I simply need more raw compute power.
> Right at this moment I have to wait an other hour for a kernel compile
> to finish. Thats why I even think about extreme solutions like a
> PeeCee. :-(

Sadly, these days a PeeCee offers the best bang for buck if you need fast
kernel builds. As you mentioned in a previous mail, an US-III-based machine
would also be good, but they're still expensive (and for me, difficult to
ship to .za due to size). Of course, the lack of NetBSD support for the
US-III is a pain (although FreeBSD is beginning to add support for it).

> I may get a Sun E3k5. Not faster per CPU, but kernel comiles scale good
> on multiple CPUs and E3k5 usually has multiple CPUs. ;-)

True. And while you're at it, you can fix NetBSD/sparc64 SMP. hehe :)

> What graphic card are you using? I have two spare Matroc G200 but last
> time I tried I was not successfull to get them running in the PWS 500au.

I don't have a decent one yet - sadly none of the local computer stores
stock PCI video cards and there aren't any being advertised in our local
computer classifieds at the moment. I'm probably going to ePay a Radeon
7000/G400/or similar. You've probably seen it already, but just in case you
haven't, a useful list of cards that work with NetBSD is at
http://www.caseydoodle.com/cards.html.

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner | http://weblogs.turner.org.za/mj/
mj at turner.org.za    | Open Source in WC ZA - http://www.clug.org.za/