Alternatives to ia32 (was Re: [ILUG] Good for hardware?)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark Dennehy (Mark.Dennehy at cs.tcd.ie):

> Useful discussion, but everything was based on ia32 systems - and I'm
> getting really sick of having every interrupt shared!  Anyone tried
> putting together a proper workstation based on Alpha or PowerPC stuff
> (as opposed to buying off-the-shelf)?

Here's my possibly ill-informed take on that:

1.  Alphas have been theoretically attractive in the past, but
now have lingering doom hanging over them, given that Intel engulfed and
devoured the production line.  Motherboards were always a bit of a
specialty item and overpriced, and you had to be careful of items
like PCI video cards, because of IA-32 dependencies in their BIOSes.
And some of the halfway reasonably-priced Alpha systems were
underdesigned in some crucial ways, e.g. heat problems on Multias
and similar machines.

2.  The PPC as a general-appeal CPU is a success story waiting to
happen.  Unfortunately, the PREP consortium fell apart, and so there's
no longer the prospect of a standard hardware target -- unless you
count Apple's irritatingly misdesigned variations on OpenFirmware.

3.  UltraSPARCs?  We can always dream of these reaching production
volumes low enough to form something resembling a mass market.

There may be something in the above analysis that I'm missing:  Others
better informed may speak up, and compensate for my hardware myopia.
But it's why I regretfully urge Athlon-based systems on people wanting
genuine Computers of Interest, IRQ-sharing and all.[1]

[1] <scsi-bigot mode=yes>What IRQ-sharing?</scsi-bigot>

-- 
"Is it not the beauty of an asynchronous form of discussion that one can go and 
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and scream out it with operatic force, volume, and decorum, and then return to 
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