Re: Dec Alpha 500 (panda boxes or PC164) Possibly OT
Greg wrote:
Hey..
My purpose is "because it sounds like fun".
In reading your email, it doesn't' seem like I can really just throw in a
new CPU. I wouldn't be opposed to a new MOBO, power supplies, & CPU, but
that sounds like it will start to get expensive. I don't know the value of
a 'current' Alpha ev67? <-- it the most current ? Then of course I would
probably need all new memory, so this exercise just got real expensive..
A short lesson:
To make it simple: Forget about that. IIRC, Alpha ev67 (as well as ev6 as
it's precedessor) was introduced back in 1999. At that time, Compaq had
already taken over DEC, the inventor of the Alpha architecture. All plans
to create a competitive HW-platform (against Intel) were abandoned back
then. As a result, the development of cheap ev6-based Systems was stopped
by Compaq (as well as the development of Windows NT for the Alpha platform).
Without having a explitily "cheap version" of ev6x (which was one of the
goals of DEC), two branches of development started. One of these branches
was based on the Tsunami chipset (AFAICT originally developed by DEC people).
Most of this Tsumani-based Systems had their CPU sitting on a "daughtercard",
which is of course incompatible to anything else. Tsunami based systems
were anything else but chaep, at least in Dual-CPU configurations, back then.
Look for a "DS10L" system at islandco.com for cheapest (but somewhat crippled,
regarding memory interface) ev6x systems. The other branch was the path taken
by Samsung, read: to create Motherboards based on the AMD 751 Chipset (look
for UP1000, UP1100, UP1500). At least some of these boards had CPUs soldered
directly on the board. Uh, did I forget API? ;-)
Current CPUs would be of type ev7 (or even ev79), which are (respectively
will be) sold by HP only together with systems to those people, who can
not be convinced to buy "more convenient" systems. Of course, there is
no "socket compatibility" to prior Alpha-Systems, as these CPUs have the
memory controller On-Chip (similar to the Opteron/Athlon64 family, which
took over this concept).
Sorry if I told something wrong or forgot something,
Stefan Schroepfer
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