On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 10:02 AM, Tim Cutts
<timc@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
On 22 Aug 2008, at 10:34 pm, Gary Lee Phillips wrote:
Institutions and individuals in tight financial situations or in less
technically advanced areas continue to use Alphas because they are what is
available. Buying newer 64-bit machines may simply be out of the question
for them.
I don't think that's true. I don't think any PC vendors now sell Wintel machines which don't have 64-bit capability.
My point was not a question of availability but of cost. The Alpha you already have, that still operates, costs nothing but electricity to run. A new machine has an initial purchase and set up cost.
With respect to electricity consumption, the machines I have don't really
use any more than other desktop PCs would. Nor do they take up a lot more
space, as far as that goes.
On the server side, that isn't true either. ES45s are huge beasts (7U high), which is enormous compared to, say, an HP DL360, which can have 8 CPU cores and a lot more memory than the ES45 in a 1U box, and will use less power too.
No question about that. I strongly suspect that most of the Alphas still in use are the more recent, smaller units. There seem to be a large number of DS10 and DS10L machines still running, for instance.
--Gary