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All Things Microsoft => Microsoft Hardware => Topic started by: Lead Head on 6 July 2005, 00:36

Title: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Lead Head on 6 July 2005, 00:36

x86 or Alpha

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: KernelPanic on 6 July 2005, 01:44

Elaborate...

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Lead Head on 6 July 2005, 02:50

wich one is better and by Alpha i do not mean the Alpha EV6 Bus protocol on Athlon CPUs, i mean the alpha architecture

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: WMD on 6 July 2005, 03:11

x86 itself is a crap architecture.  Almost anything you can name will be better.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: mobrien_12 on 6 July 2005, 03:45

You mean the old DEC Alpha Chips?

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Lead Head on 6 July 2005, 05:37

yep, i believe those are the ones that needed massive heatsinks, i do not know to much about old stuff because i am only a kid so, you get the point, I wonder what AMDs architecture was before they switched to x86

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: WMD on 6 July 2005, 06:15

AMD was always x86.  Before CPUs they made FPUs to go along with the <=386.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: mobrien_12 on 6 July 2005, 07:35

The Alpha's were RISC architecture chips and they belonged to DEC.  I remember there being 1 GHz alpha chips years before x86 architecture hit those clock speeds.  From what I understand, they were pretty expensive, and relegated to the server or workstation market.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: KernelPanic on 6 July 2005, 12:11

Yeh they were pretty cool, but Digital sold out to Compaq who sold out to HP  and in the end the Alpha was killed off.
Like most *NIX workstation arches it was RISC, big cache, kickass speed.
Old versions of NT could be used as could OpenVMS and some other shit.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Lead Head on 6 July 2005, 16:53

i wonder of you can use Mac OS X on an Alpha since both are RISC cpus, just a thought

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: KernelPanic on 7 July 2005, 00:49

If you go and read what RISC actually means that question should answer itself.

Short Answer:
Yes and No, If someone cared enough.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Lead Head on 7 July 2005, 19:15

I know what it means Reduced Instruction Set, All video games consoles. And MACs use them(not for long).

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: WMD on 7 July 2005, 23:55

But RISC itself isn't an architecture, it's a way to implement them.  RISC CPUs include:

PowerPC
MIPS
Alpha
Itanium

And those are all much different.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Kintaro on 17 August 2005, 20:36

Yeah, young padawan, there is many factors on processors. Basically they have instructions (machine code) which are best represented as scary hexadecimal or binary numbers. These tell the processor to do things. Different processors have different instruction sets, but PowerPC and Alpha might use a similar innovations (RISC) to get proformance, they are still however very different. Then we have things like big endian/little endian, the list goes on and on and on and on and on.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: DBX_5 on 17 August 2005, 21:23

Personnaly, I prefer a quantum CPU, wich uses Qubits which can be a zero, a one, or both and some other things at once. Then I can rule the world and buy out bill gates.

PS- speaking of OpenVMS - I ordered a promotional CD from HP . Very kewl.
You can get yours free here too:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/business_solutions_cd.html
http://www.webfulfillment.com/kphp/webevent/regques.asp?EventCode=574291

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Kintaro on 17 August 2005, 21:44

Nothing compares to the DEC VAX.

(I own 2 VaxStations)

MUHAHAHA

VMS fucking rocks.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: MarathoN on 18 August 2005, 01:04

I choose PowerPC :D

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Kintaro on 18 August 2005, 16:19

Note, the PowerPC chips used in IBM systems have a few important features the ones they sell to Apple lack. I suggest you read the wikipedia page on PowerPC for more information.

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: MarathoN on 18 August 2005, 17:17

Oh yeah, I've read that already, but even so, I still choose PowerPC, I grew up using Mac OS System 7. :D

Title: Re: x86 or Alpha
Post by: Kintaro on 30 November 2005, 19:06

Well, you still suck because I have a Sun Blade 100 (UltraSPARC IIi at 500mhz) with FreeBSD 5.4 installed.

It kicks arse.