> I have been trying to figure out chip and motherboard types and need
> advice. Is the industry reinventing the x86SX crap? Compromise the real
> thing and trick consumers into buying the chape but inferior product? The
> 21164PC, with all L2 Cach off-chip, appears to be something to avoid,
> though cheap.
I really don't think so, but haven't tried them myself so I'm just
speaking based on benchmarks. I know, I know: lies, big lies, and
benchmarks, but at least they're something. For their price, they're
probably worth it. For many workloads, I'd better buy a somewhat slower
CPU and tons of memory instead.
> Assume a workstation rather than a server utilization, what is the
> difference between the 21164 and the 21164a? Compared with a dual PII, say
> 233 or 266, how fast is a 300 Mhz or 533 Mhz alpha with "enough" memory
> (say, 128MB).
Hate to say this, but "it depends" :-). If you're going to develop
and your most cpu-intensive job is compiling, P-II (and K6) are really
fast at that. If you are going to run heavy duty floating point
simulations, the alpha will run circles around the P-II. For any mix of
these extreme cases, YMMV :-)
Re the 21164 (EV5) and the so called 21164A (EV56), the former
drains far more current (thus, more heat), doesn't support byte accesses
and doesn't support speeds >333MHz. Also, the latest chipsets (pyxis) are
available for the EV56 only (PC164LX) and give much better bandwidth.
> This suggests to me that anything more than a 233 or 300 Mhz alpha is the
> prototypic squirrel hunt with cruise missles (excepting massively
> numerically intensive jobs).
Lots of people out there have too much money and an insane Quake
addiction, remember ;-)
Regards,
Miguel