|
i've never seen an alpha system myself. do any of the vintage hardware folks around here have one? what were they like to use? what was good and bad? what were they good at?
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2022 08:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 08:31 |
|
|
what were Alpha systems mostly used for? high-end workstations, or servers?Kazinsal posted:it's DEC's least interesting ISA what would you say was their most interesting ISA?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2022 01:08
|
|
|
i mean yeah but i was kinda hoping to get some first-hand stories or maybe even a cool picture from one of the yosposters who keeps old hardware around
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2022 01:45
|
|
|
yeah if a mod wants to amend the thread title to "show/tell me about dec [stuff]" i'm cool w/ thateschaton posted:[good post] thanks!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2022 18:02
|
|
|
Kazinsal posted:anyways there's my giant effortpost on x86 memory management. if I think of anything else about re: the x86 that could be fun and/or I could link back to DEC hardware (sorry for fuckin up your thread OP) I'll put together a batch of thoughts and post 'em. apology refused. this post was excellent and i would love to see more like it. 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2022 01:12
|
|
|
where did DEC go for chip fab? did they have their own plant, did they hire others?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2022 19:16
|
|
|
Lady Radia posted:the turbo buttonj makes your computer faster, it's right there in the name i remember my dad being grumpy about "turbo" being used as a word for "fast" "oh is there a turbine involved? no?? so why did you use the word turbo?!"
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2022 22:36
|
|
|
Kazinsal posted:AMD spun their fabs off in 2008 and sold a majority share in the resulting company to get rid of like a billion dollars in debt and it kept them afloat long enough to develop Zen, demand for which is high enough that AMD probably wishes they still had their own fabs lol i would think they're happier with being able to hire TSMC and get bleeding edge fabs, but i could be wrong
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2022 09:19
|
|
|
were 8088s really substantially cheaper to manufacture than 8086s, or was that mostly a market segmentation thing?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2022 09:21
|
|
|
JawnV6 posted:DEC teams survived long after the company itself went under, there were specific projects where decades later there was significant resistance to the intel way of doing things i'm curious to hear about what the differences were between the DEC way and the Intel way of doing things
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2022 07:31
|
|
|
hell yes get that HP hardware in here! what's the difference between the rp2430 and rp2470 and what did you have to do to make the former think it's the latter? does MPE/iX normally not boot on the 2430?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2022 18:07
|
|
|
Captain Foo posted:that sounds like something that there is literally nobody smart enough to use correctly what actually spurred me to start this thread was re-reading a fun article about someone getting bit by speculative execution triggering what sounds like a "nobody smart enough to use correctly" instruction on the xbox360 CPU, and at the very end of the article mentioning that they had cited that as a nasty problem to debug, and the interviewer immediately coming back with “yeah, we hit something similar on the Alpha processor” https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/finding-a-cpu-design-bug-in-the-xbox-360/ quote:But, the CPU was for a video game console and performance trumped all so a new instruction was added – xdcbt. The normal PowerPC dcbt instruction was a typical prefetch instruction. The xdcbt instruction was an extended prefetch instruction that fetched straight from memory to the L1 d-cache, skipping L2. This meant that memory coherency was no longer guaranteed, but hey, we’re video game programmers, we know what we’re doing, it will be fine.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2022 23:16
|
|
|
oh hey and it looks like that guy recently wrote another article where he dives further into the xbox360 CPU: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/01/12/5-5-mm-in-1-25-nanoseconds/#more-3829
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2022 23:24
|
|
|
oh, that's right. although even without the speculative execution issue it looks like it was still pretty dangerous to use
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2022 23:34
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 08:31 |
|
|
i feel like that microvax ought to be the next yosbbs host
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2022 07:50
|
|