Does anyone out there know about the DEC Alpha Series of PC's
and Sun SparcStations?  I would like to get as much technical
information and performance comparisons.  I know that there
is a Sparc 1, Sparc 5, Sparc 10, and a Sparc 20.  If there are more,
please tell me.  I don't even know what kind of DEC Alphas there
are.  If someone can tell me about these and, if possible, Compare a
DEC to a Sparc.

Oh, and I would like to know the approximate price of each.

Thanks in advance.

4 responses total.

I know little about DEC's ALPHA, but regarding Sun and SPARC:

1) There are many SPARC chipsets, with different performance capabilities.
2) SPARC chipsets are manufactured by various companies.  The SPARC is
a Sun design, yes, but they've opened the architecture to all comers, 
and there is a consortium and standards body, known as SPARC International,
that manages the architecture and future direction.
3) Sun Microsystems has a variety of products that use SPARC technology,
from small powered workstations and Xterminals to large multiprocessing
servers.  For details on their product line, you might call your local
Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation sales office, and ask for brochures,
product comparisons (called "speeds and feeds" by computer salespeople),
etc.  If you have access to the World Wide Web (WWW), you might try
connecting directly to SMCC's WWW server.  Try:

        http://www.sun.com

if I remember correctly.

4) For performance comparisons of one company's products with another,
one typically looks at performance results, called "benchmarks."  Un-
fortunately, most comparitive benchmarks have little to do with realistic
workloads.  Other than repeatability, they usually offer little guidance.
There's a science known as "benchmarketing" -- designing products to
meet industry benchmark script performance rather than anything useful --
that also limits benchmark validity.

In Open System environments, there are many different industry standard
benchmarks.  Your hardware vendors will be happy to supply you with
results from the particular benchmark that makes their product look
the best.  Can you compare them?  Sometimes.  Good luck!

The Alpha processor architecture is a 64 bit Risc Architecture.
It is available in a desktop package (Dec Alpha PC) and as I recall
the prices start around $5k, but you probably want to spend $7k to
get a decent development environment if you're writing code.

It is a very fast machine, but I have done no comparisons on it yet.
The Alpha PC can run OSF/1 Unix, Open VMS, or Alpha Windows NT.
The NT software will run MS Windows 16 bit apps by emulating an 80386
running in 16 bit mode.  There is no support for 32bit 80386 programs.
They need to be recoiompiled to native alpha 64 bit code.

Actually, "benchmarking" means many different things.  In tqm,
"benchmarking" means to find the best product that's out in
your market, then to design a product that will be better
than that product.  If you did a good job identifying your
target product's strengths, you can make your product cheaper,
and your production, sales, and marketing are all on top of things,
you may have a good shot even at a mature market place.  The
japanese have perfected this technique, that's how they
broke into such established markets as tv's & automobiles.

Surveyors (the gus you find out on the highways dressed in orange)
also make use of bencharmks.  There seems to be one outside of CITI,
at the argus building.

For more information on DEC alphas, your best bet is probably
your local sales office.  DEC is very much behind in the RISC business,
and they know it, so they're likely to be very helpful in
terms of providing information.  Sun is much more established, so
you'll probably be comparitively lucky to even get a price sheet.
But much depends on the individual sales person you reach, and
how you approach them.

I can give you some real basic information on Sparc's, kind of
like srw's.  Most sparc implementations are 32 bit, but there
is one new sparc implementation (hypersparc) that is 64 bit.
Sparc's can run either solaris 2 or sunos 4.  sunos 4 is older
and more established, but is no longer being actively supported
and only supports uniprocessors.  solaris 2 supports multi-processor
machines, is very much like system v release 4, and is newer
and somewhat less stable.  sparc machines range from desktop
designs, such as the sparcstation 5 etc., to fairly large
and expensive machines such as the sparcserver 2000.

Before you can really evaluate which machine is "better", you
really need to make some decisions, such as what do you
plan to do with the machine, what is important and what
is not so imporatnt - such as what things does it have to
do, and what will make a difference in your aplication,
and what kind of budget you have.  Shear CPU speed is
almost certainly the less important factor.  Network,
disk and RAM are of equal importance for most real-world applications.
In some applications, floating point perforamnce is important.
Software support is often a crucial factor in determining how
fast you can put your machine into production.  A mature software
environment may well be worth a factor of two difference in
CPU speed, all by itself.  You should also decide if your
application can best be served by canned commercial software,
by the use of a few carefully chosen commercial software
tools, or will require a lot of C coding and time.

There are som eother machines you should look at as well:
 the Mac PowerPC
 the intel Pentium & competition
 HP risc machines
 IBM AIX and RS/6K's.
Each of these has their own strengths, depending on your application,
one might be best.

Hello I hear about cheap Alpha 21164PC that will be released in 
September. Dec also announced the new FX!32that convert NT 32 
bit application from X 86 platform to Alpha. I will see the
final version and if they can compete with Cheap dual Pentium II/P6.
Regards (AW)

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