[Info-vax] In memoriam: 10 years since Alpha's passing away.

[Michael Kraemer]

urbancamo schrieb:

> When evaluating hardware back then the DEC knocked spots off the
> competition for the price point I was looking at (approx. GBP 10k)
> It was a big deal to *me* having a 250MHz processor to do

Now if you had written which DEC model you actually had used
back then we could make a fair comparison in hindsight.
250MHz tells nothing since the Alpha burns a lot of MHz
to achieve the same performance as other chips.

> visualization with, at least, and the 512-bit memory bandwidth came in
> very handy too...

Yes,
the memory bandwidth is probably as (if not more) important as the
bitness of the registers.
But that's a property of the actual machine, not the processor, no?

> Yes, and of course the ability to process data in 64 bit chunks
> natively is more what I was getting at, rather than having a 64-bit
> address bus that you
> could never use. 
> Hey, I had 64MB and that was a fairly impressive
> amount of RAM in 1994!

Yes, but not unusual for RISC workstations in general.

> Have you ever tried doing 64 bit floating point on a VAX using MACRO.
> No, me neither - it was just too much of a PITA.

Well, a VAX is not really a competition for an Alpha box,
that would be the other RISCs, all of them had 64bit FP too.