p4 v itinium

[George France]

On Friday 17 May 2002 21:30, Serguei Patchkovskii wrote:
> 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 ...

Hello Serguei,

You are comparing oranges to elephants.  It appears that Athlons will not 
meet the needs of Mr Rankin due to the addressing limits that were mentioned. 
 It sounds like the application will need large amounts of memory, fast 
floating point, a very optimized fortran compiler and possibly high I/O 
bandwidth which leads to Alpha Systems.  I do not find comparing the cost of 
systems that will support the application vs the cost of unusable systems, 
very helpful.  

Best Regards,


--George