[NTLUG:Discuss] Alphaserver 2100 -- do the BSD's have good MP yet?

[Bryan J. Smith]

Burton M. Strauss III wrote:  
> - For a current OS, I think FreeBSD (or NetBSD - it runs on ANYTHING)
> may be your best choice.

Eric Schnoebelen wrote:  
> I strongly recommend NetBSD.  As the comment above says, it runs on
> anything.. :-)
> I've got an entire cluster of Alphas running NetBSD here, from
> AlphaPC64's through AlphaPC164's to Digital Server 3305's to
> (lots of) DS10L's..   Nary a burp.

But aren't those uP (uniprocessor)?

I've been outside the BSD loop for a bit.
But I was under the impression that no BSD kernel has a good
MP implementation yet.  Am I mistaken?

For older hardware, Debian Linux/Alpha is not bad at all.
I'd recommend it.  But I don't know "how well maintained" it is.
But Digital did have Linux develop 64-bit on Alpha back in '95
onward, donating all the hardware he needed.

BTW, here's the release notes on FreeBSD 5.2.1 for the Alphaserver
2000 series, including the 2100:  
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2.1R/hardware-alpha.html#AEN1009  

> Put it on  your network, and put those processors to
> work.. seti at home is good, as even at 275Mhz, they've got
> incredible floating point capabilities.

No joke!  Intel's Itanium2 at 1.5GHz smokes a P4EE at 3.2GHz
in floating point like 2:1.  But a 4-year old Alpha 21264 at 667MHz still
beats the Itanium2/1.5GHz by a good 33% or so.

Now a 21064 @ 275MHz isn't going to.  But it's probably equivalent to
P3 1.0GHz.  And the P3 1.0GHz has a FPU that is equivalent to a P4
2.0GHz.  That's why the P4 relies so much on SSE for performance, and
it's "lossy math" too.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I. -- b.j.smith at ieee.org