[Info-vax] Tadpole Alphabook 1 at last!

[John Wallace]

On Aug 21, 7:52 am, hel... at astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <8JS2q.118520$Ll1.89... at newsfe24.ams2>, "Colin Butcher"
>
> <colinDOT.butche... at xdeltaDOT.coDOT.uk> writes:
> > It will work with the BA35x shelves and pizza boxes, provided you use 8bit
> > discs and the 8bit HD SCSI connector cable and the 8bit SE terminator on the
> > pizza box.
>
> > You can boot from the external discs / CD. It's how I set mine up.
>
> OK, but booting from external disks rather goes against the idea of a
> laptop.
>
> It is no longer supported with the latest VMS.  (Of course, it might
> work.)  Such a beast would be nice to have, but I wouldn't want to run
> an old version of VMS just for that.
>
> How does it compare in speed to more familiar ALPHA systems?

If you need to ask, you probably don't want to know?

Performance is similar to a comparably-clocked Alpha Multia, which
should not be a surprise, as they share major parts of the system
design.

The Multia was based on the 21066/21068, which was a high-integration
version of the 21064 intended to permit a much smaller parts count in
the overall system, because lots more was on the CPU chip (e.g. the
memory controller was integrated, just add DRAM, no need for
northbridge/southbridge/etc). Somewhere in that integration process
something didn't quite go right and the performance relative to a
21064 of the same MHz was disappointing (in part due to the memory bus
performance, iirc).