mpe wrote on 2020-11-15, 22:58:
Nice one. I'd say DEC Alpha 21066. It is quite cool motherboard. Note there is no chipset. Just Intel SIO. The PCI controller and northbridge is in the CPU.
Dead right. It's a DEC "noname" AXPpci33 board with 166MHz Alpha 21066 on it. Pretty low-end as Alphas go, both in terms of clock speed and system bus ('only' 64b wide), but in context of when it was released still a monster: the fastest Pentium at the time of the release of the 21066 166MHz was 66MHz, although by the time this board was released you could get a P100. Of course, IPC of a pure RISC design was lower, but clock-for-clock a Pentium was around 1.5x faster, so this thing was still faster than the fastest Pentium in its day., particularly in FPU-heavy applications.
I've actually been looking for an Alpha 21164PC CPU, as I have a nice ATX board for that with no CPU, but they appear rarer than hen's teeth (the last one on CPUworld of course was sold a week before I started looking almost 2 years ago :') ), so this was plan B.
20-odd years ago I ran Linux on some Alphas, but for lack of a decent purpose (they were outdated by then already) that was really not worth the effort. Now I want to run WinNT for Alpha (or if I find that 21164PC Win2k RC2, the last Windows-for-Alpha version) and see how usable the x86 emulation/translation is. Supposedly around the time this came out, an Alpha doing transcoding was actually the fastest CPU to run x86 code on. If so the obvious question is: will it run Crysis Quake 😉
