[ale] DEC Alpha?

[tfreeman]

Well, I got a Digital UDB at 166, so number cruching isn't something I
will be doing. OTOH, the differences between the RH4.2 releases for intel
and axp are pretty mild (would have to be to let me go between them). The
biggest annoyance is that portions of the control panel are broken on the
alpha. But I'm using command lines anyway, so no big deal. YMMV

On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, steve wrote:

> I need to do some serious number crunching and am wondering if a dec alpha
> is the right way to go.  I know it's got the horsepower, but what sort of
> learning curve is there when going from linux(x86) -> linux(alpha)?  I plan
> on using only freeware plus my own code, so I don't think I'll have to fool
> with the x86 emulator stuff.
> 
> Is this a nightmare?  Should I just get a PII and be done with it?  I need
> heavy floating point, and looking at the benchmarks from the DES Challenge
> (http://www.frii.com/~rcv/desbench.htm), it looks like a 500MHz Dec alpha
> would be nice :-)
> 
> TIA
> 
> Steve
> sjd at mindspring.com
>