Alpha 21264.

[Andy Almond <Andrew Almond man ac uk>]

Three questions relating to the 21264 CPU and 264DP motherboard.

(a) I haven't used a dual processor before, so how much performance can you expect over a single CPU machine when working on a single job using an SMP linux kernel. Can you configure the system to use both CPUs for an ordinary job, or does that require a special compilation option/re-coding?

(b) Are DEC fortran/C ev6 compilers going to be available under linux? or is DEC UNIX or NT the only way to achieve this? I assume that the performance of gcc will be relatively poor compared with DECs C compiler, as is the case for the 21164 processor.

(c) Will code already compiled for ev56 CPUs run efficiently on an ev6 CPU?

Any comments appreciated.

Dr. Andrew Almond.
University of Manchester. UK.