alphas and linux

[Garry Turkington]

Hi,

Just to complete the pedantry re the Alpha questions:

Saqib is quite right that there was a NT 4 port for the Alpha.  Rumours
also had it that Microsoft abandoned Windows 2000 for Alpha late in the
development phase.  The fact  that my Alpha BIOS explicitly mentions
Windows 2000 makes me believe this. :)

Alphas are still in production, but the recently announced EV78 revision
(I think it was) is the last iteration of the architecture.  HP (now
owners after the Compaq merger) view the Intel Itanium as their preferred
processor platform and are keen for both Alpha and PA-RISC customers to
migrate in this direction.  HP also own VMS which you can still buy.  Note
that the world's longest running cluster is a German VMS cluster that's
had continuous operation for over 5 years now.

And an Alpha 500 would have fared very positively against an equivalently
clocked Pentium III.

Regards,
Garry

Garry Turkington
garry.turkington at acm.org