On Friday 16 December 2005 7:48 am, John Summerfield wrote:

Depending on how much "cpu intensive" work you do and youd budget, Opteron or Power. I've seen some benchmarks between the Intel EM64T and the AMD-64. For CPU intensive work, they are roughly equal, but for memory or peripheral issues, AMD-64 is better.

If you ise AMD-64 or compatible, also look at Interl's icc: it can save a truckload of CPU. Intel's ICC compiler can generate some very efficient code. I did some benchmarks on the IA64 with the ICC compiler against GCC, and found results were significantly faster using ICC. GCC is certainly better for portability, but ICC has a mode for full GCC compatibility. It is a closed source compiler, but is free for personal use.

Also note that a 64-bit application may not run faster in 64-bit mode. Depends on the application. When building on x86-64 platforms, you can chose to build either 64-bit or 32-bit. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Friday 16 December 2005 9:41 am, Peter M. Groen wrote:

Isn't anybody considering Alpha's anymore? I love the Alpha, but it is end-of-lifed and no longer actively supported by most Linux distros. Debian still provides a current port to the Alpha. Note that future development of the Alpha chip was stopped before HP acquired Compaq.

-- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Friday 16 December 2005 1:34 pm, Allen wrote:

Didn't 10.1 just get ported to Alpha though?

Personally if I needed HARDCORE CPU power, I'd go with Quad Xeons and a Gog or two of RAM, or maybe A big BIG 24 Processor Sun machine. I think Linux can run on those. That would be great, but I don't think so. Not sure if Linux will run on the Big Suns. It does run on the big HPs and IBMs.

-- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Friday 16 December 2005 2:25 pm, Marc Collin wrote:

forget the alpha or the xeon take the a dual opteron dual core it will kill your xeon machine The dual core AMD 64 is an excellent processor and for a few reasons I stated earlier is that the AMD chips are better than the Intel chips today. (Dual core Xeon will ship 1st quarter next year). What you want to buy really comes down to what you need the system for. Essentially a dual core chip is effectively 2 separate chips that share some of the same resources and manufacturers are promoting it as 2 chips.

The bottom line is always going to be what you are going to do with it. They once put jet engines on a DC3 (military C-47) and didn't get any better performance than the prop version. You've got to look at the chip, the chipset and memory. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

Allen, On Friday 16 December 2005 10:34, Allen wrote:

...

Didn't 10.1 just get ported to Alpha though?

You're thinking of this announcement posted to the SuSE-Announce list, perhaps? -==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==- Subject: SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 2 is ready SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 2 is ready for testing. ... -==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==- That's "alpha" as in "alpha, "beta," "pre-release" / "release candidate," "final." Not Alpha the processor architecture. Randall Schulz

Peter M. Groen wrote:

Isn't anybody considering Alpha's anymore?

Is DEC^H^H^HCompaq^H^H^H^H^H^H HP still making them? I thought the Alpha sort of died.