In the escalating war between NT and Unix, NT gurus have been heard to bemoan the fact that NT does not have the processing hardware available to perform any serious workstation tasks. The new range of Alpha workstations from Digital endeavours to dispel that notion. The Alpha workstations are legendary in their ability to apply more processing pressure to an NT application than any Intel equivalent on the market. With the gradual death of MIPS and the definite death of the PowerPC as alternative Windows NT platforms, Alpha remains the only realistic alternative hardware platform for Windows NT.
Most of today’s Unix workstations use proprietary controllers and components, often resulting in a very expensive workstation. Digital manages to use standard PC industry components within its Alpha Personal Workstation family. This offers cheaper workstations, without degrading performance. The ‘a’ series of Digital workstations is designed solely to run Windows NT on Alpha. Digital also has an ‘1’ series of workstations based upon Intel processors and designed to run NT. The final member of the family, the ‘au’ workstation series, is designed to run both Digital Unix and Windows NT in the one system.
The typical specifications of one of these Alpha workstations reads like a wish-list for power users. The system that Digital submitted for evaluation featured the baby-processor of the ‘a’ series models, running at 433MHz. Its more powerful siblings, the 500a and 600a, house 500MHz and 600MHz versions of the 21164 Digital Alpha processor.
The Digital Alpha 21164 microprocessor itself has 16K of LI cache and 96K of on-chip L2 cache. Our evaluation system had no external (L3) cache, although it is possible to upgrade to 2M of L3 cache for the extra performance. Digital’s Alpha workstations use standard SDRAM DIMMs for main memory — and plenty of them. Our test system came with 128M, but it is possible to upgrade to a maximum of 1.5G of ECC SDRAM main memory. A standard PCI Matrox Millennium card pumped the graphics on our test system. Digital also supplied an AccelPRO 2500 adapter, as well as Digital’s own PowerStorm range of workstation-level OpenGL accelerators.
The drive subsystem on the 433a can either be the onboard EIDE or an Adaptec 2940UW PCI Ultra Wide SCSI controller, or the Qlogic equivalent. Our evaluation unit had the Adaptec 2940UW controller inside, running two Digital 2G Ultra Wide SCSI hard disk drives. The CD-ROM drive was a 12x ATAPI model, running from the onboard EIDE controller. For networking, a 10/100BaseTX controller is integrated into the system. The 433a is fully multimedia-capable, with a 16-bit Sound Blaster-compatible chip onboard. The unit has a microphone input, as well as a line-in and line-out jack. The Alpha also includes all the other standard ports, such as two serial ports and one ECP parallel printer port, as well as audio and joystick ports.
Unfortunately, we were unable to adequately benchmark the Alpha to compare performance with a similar Intel NT-based system. Under general usability testing we found that native Alpha NT applications loaded much faster than the same application on our 200MHz Pentium Pro with comparable specifications. We will have a direct benchmark shootout between an Alpha system and a 300MHz Pentium II system available on APC’s Web site in the near future.
To get the best performance from an Alpha system, you need to run NT applications compiled for the Alpha version of Windows NT. Engineers at Digital have written software called FX32! to run most applications written for Windows NT on Intel, or even Windows 95 on an Alpha system running NT 4.0. FX32! recompiles some of the x86 Win32 libraries into Alpha Win32 libraries and then executes the new program. This is much faster than running the program in pure emulation. Every time you run the application the FX32! software recompiles more of it into native Alpha to run faster.
Digital has a list of x86 applications verified to run with the FX32! including titles such as Adobe PageMaker 6.0, CorelDRAW 7.0, Lotus WordPro 96, Microsoft Office 95, Netscape 3.0 and WinZip 6.2. The current version of FX32! does not run Office 97 but the FX32! team has stated that it will be supported in the next release.
While most users would never consider buying a workstation, the Alphas are more affordable than other Unix workstations. The ‘au’ series starts from $5,920, and goes up to $26,600 for a 600MHz workstation with all the fittings. The unit we reviewed weighed in at $10,950, which included a 17in monitor from Digital.
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