p4 v itinium

[Serguei Patchkovskii]

From: "George France" <france at handhelds.org>
> Have you thought about Alpha Systems?? A single process can access more
than
> 4GB of memory.  Alpha's have very good fortran compilers.  Since the HP /
> Compaq merger, it appears that Alpha still be around through EV79 chipset,
> according to the product road maps that were published on the web.

Unfortunately, "cheap" Alphas are limited to either 2Gbytes (UP2000+) or
4Gbytes
(DS20, DP264?) of physical memory - which makes the advantage of the large
virtual address space more or less moot. AFAIK, the cheapest Alpha, capable
of
addressing more than 4Gbytes of physical RAM (ES40), costs about the same as
a cluster of 10 dual Athlon nodes, with 4Gbytes of memory -each-, and a nice
interconnect. Unless you absolutely must have that large address space, an
alpha
is not a very good buy  these days ...

Serguei