22 Apr
2020
22 Apr
'20
8:40 p.m.
Mark - I did actually bid on the alpha box you were offering and may have asked what sort
of price you were thinking about for the itanium box too but, long story short, my email
to you probably ended up in your gmail spam folder thanks to my email server deciding to
route google mail over IPv6 and I hadn't put enough of the DNS records in place for
IPv6 addresses. Ah well. I'm happy enough with SIMH VAX at the moment.
Keith
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Mark
Benson
Sent: 22 April 2020 19:10
To: <hecnet at update.uu.se> <hecnet at Update.UU.SE>
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI
Wow, I *may* have jumped too soon in deciding to let my DEC gear go! Realistically, and
sadly, though, it isn?t likely to get used even with a new programme in place. I?m glad
there?s something planned out for continuity, though. It means I can hopefully still putz
with VMS in SimH if I need to revisit it.
> I might actually go out and buy a cheap alpha or
itanic at some point now?.. if such things exist.
Alphas are getting a smidge rare, seem to be more parts around these days than whole
units.
Itanium systems you are limited to supported HP Integrity units. There don?t seem to be a
lot of those around at an acceptable price point in this neck of the woods either, they
are currently in that horrible ?someone in Enterprise might give us a huge pile of notes
for this if they are desperate? price band.
I can see an Alpha, but why would you want a wacko
architecture created by Intel? It's not as if they have any track record of designing
nice CPU architectures.
Itanium wasn?t Intel?s idea, it was HP?s s far as I know, it originated as the EPIC
architecture. They turned to Intel to assist in developing it because the climate at the
time made developing it in-house untenable (it was around the time when. Explains why HP
clung to it for so long! As a side-note, you?ll notice Intel actually bailed on using it
in anything but HPC and specialist applications in 2004 be implementing EM64t (amd64) on
P4s and Xeons instead (mostly leant on by Microsoft, no doubt).
As far as VMS goes, aside from it?s slightly fierce power consumption, a zx6000 with a
Radeon 7000 PCI video card does run VMS really well indeed. Until VMS hits x86_64, Itanium
is essentially the pinnacle of OpenVMS hardware in terms of performance. Makes for a good
room heater too.
?
Mark Benson