[HECnet] Running an emulated Alpha off an SSD...

[Sampsa Laine]

Just thought I'd mention this - I just installed the Alpha-VM product by those Russian guys and have it configured as a 1 CPU ES40 with 512 MB RAM, no JIT CPU acceleration.

However, I decided to stick the system / data (this is a toy system, so only using one 20 GB disk image) on my SSD and the thing FLIES.

Even though VUPS.COM and WHETSTONE (not great benchmarks for Alphas I know, but I was just doing some ballpark numbers) show that the box should be 5x slower than CHIMPY, it feels just as a fast or ever faster..

I think in a few years it'll be possible to run some pretty beefy Alpha boxes on a combo of SSD storage and commodity Intel server hardware (almost considering migrating CHIMPY onto this box to save on power :)

Now if I only had a license for their 4 core, JIT compiled version that supports like 16 GB of RAM..Sigh...

sampsa	<sampsa at mac.com>
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