x86 or Alpha

[Lead Head]

x86 or Alpha

[KernelPanic]

Elaborate...

[Lead Head]

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

[WMD]

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

[mobrien_12]

You mean the old DEC Alpha Chips?

[Lead Head]

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

[WMD]

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

[mobrien_12]

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.

[KernelPanic]

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.

[Lead Head]

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

[KernelPanic]

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

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

[Lead Head]

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

[WMD]

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.

[Kintaro]

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.

[DBX_5]

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