Mark Wendt (Contractor) wrote: > > Did you ever get to play around with the Alpha machines? Oh, sure! We converted over to all Alphas, maybe about 1995?
One big problem we had was the difference in the stack calling frame between VAX and Alpha. On the VAX, the first word in the frame was the argument count. Alpha got rid of that, and we had TONS of code that had been written for a variable number of arguments. We had to recode a lot of stuff. Also, after the compiler had re-strung the instruction order to optimize the load/store sequence, it became a bit hard to know what line of code the error happened on. We never had big Alpha systems, only a variety of desktop-size machines. They were still a lot faster that even mainframe VAXes. Well, the Pentium 2, 3 and 4 incorporate some of the CPU technology of the Alpha. They are still held back by the AWFUL accretion of an instruction set, though. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
