[Info-vax] Alpha CPU revision & serial number, blank?

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:44:33 +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> On 2011-12-21 18:15, Paul Sture wrote:
>> On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:02:32 -0600, Bob Koehler wrote:
>>
>>> In article<4ef11a62$0$6943$e4fe514c at news2.news.xs4all.nl>, MG
>>> <marcogbNO at SPAMxs4all.nl>  writes:
>>>>
>>>> My guess is that the revision and serial number information was
>>>> mostly added there to identify IA-64 (and possibly later Alpha)
>>>> processors?
>>>
>>>     The serial number of a VAX 11/780 was readable from the system ID
>>>     register.  I haven't seen such since VAX-11, but I'd not be
>>>     surprized if it was there on an 8000 series VAX with an SBI.
>>
>> Didn't all 750s have the same ID?
> 
> I don't think so. But it was probably not hard to change. It was
> probably some wirewrap, jumpers or switches somewhere. Part of the SID
> was fixed (the high byte), but the rest was implementation defined.
> 
> Checking a little, it seems as if the SID of the VAX-11/750 actually
> holds hardware and ucode revision numbers. So I'd say that there wasn't
> properly a serial number, but it also wasn't necessarily the same for
> all machines.

When I was using 750s that all came from one OEM I thought it could be 
down to that particular OEM, but hardware and ucode revision numbers 
would definitely explain why they all looked the same to me.

It's a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure I'm talking about the value 
returned by f$getsyi("SID").

-- 
Paul Sture