Why Alpha? (aka: is it worth it?)

[Adam Wiggins <adam angel com>]

Hi all,

   I've been salivating over getting an alpha workstation for some years
now.  My work is frequently heavily math intensive, especially with
floating point.  Now I'm very seriously considering making the switch, and
have been investigating prices and options from various Linux-friendly
vendors.  Looking at the prices, I'm starting to wonder if it is really
"worth it".  I could build a 400 mhz K6-based system w/ SCSI and lots of
RAM for probably $1000.  The basic Alpha system I'm looking at (533 mhz
21164) is probably going to cost me well over double that.  However, I've
become increasingly disillusioned with the shody design of x86 (I cut my
programming teath on the 68000 and the Sparc, which at least had reasonbly
clean designs).  In particular we've had prototype Katmais (that's
the Intel Pentium III) in the office for about 6 months now, and they
are a joke.  It's time for x86 to leave my desktop.

   I've been following the threads about people "reventing" back to
x86, and it sounds like there's argument either way.  What I was hoping
for it to get those same people to give some specifics as to why
one or the other is better.

   My needs include web browsing (Netscape or the equivilent), The GIMP, 3D
tools (such as Blender and OpenGL acceleration), and running MUD server(s).
None of this stuff is necessarily bound to any specific platform; hopefully
with the Xi, Metro-X, and SuSE Permedia-accelerated X servers on the way,
3D acceleartion will finally be a reality for the Alpha.  (Currently I do all
my stuff on the 3dfx series of 3d accelerators, but from the looks of it Glide
is not going to make it to the Alpha anytime soon.  A true shame.)

   However, I've heard a lot of people having problems with what seem like
pretty basic things to me; eg, getting Netscape/Mozilla to run properly (it's
buggy enough on the x86!), or Gnome running slowly.  There are also some small
niceties missing - for example, AGP video, which makes a big difference in
screen update time when panning around a nearly full-screen image in the Gimp
in my prefered screen mode, 1280x1024x[16|24].

   So - is it worth it?  Will I see enough of a speedup from a (say) PII-266
to a 21164-533?  What about from a PII-450 to a 21164-533?  Better yet, what's
going to make the difference in speed - would it be better to go up in mhz
(say, to 600 or more) or to get a motherboard with more cache?  I'm already
planning on UW-SCSI and at least 256 megs of RAM, of course.

I'd like to hear both sides to this story, and I'm sure others would as well.
I've always thought of Alpha as sort of a holy grail to deliver Linux users
from the chains of x86, but lurking on this list has disillusioned me a little
bit.  So convince me - you guys are using Alphas, so you must like 'em. :)

Thanks,
Adam