Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:50:20 02/05/99
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On February 05, 1999 at 14:52:07, Don Dailey wrote: [snip] >There are some companies selling these machines at reasonable >prices, better than you might think. They can run Windows NT and >Linux. Crafty would really scream on this machine. I don't know >if Bob has an Alpha NT port or not, but there is a good chance a >recompile of Crafty will do the trick. There is an ALPHA NT version at my website. It is a single CPU compile, but it is just a #define away from being an SMP version. If anybody wants me to build an SMP version for the Alpha chip, let me know. We have an Alpha machine being used in C.A.P. right now. If I did a port for our big ALPHA unix machine, we might really see some performance. The Alpha NT machine we have is a pipsqueak (old and not a very high MHz chip). >The big problem is how many >programs will run on an NT Alpha machine? This I don't really know. >But theoretically, it should be easy to port most NT software. It they are in C, it should not take much. Especially if they are simply Winboard engines. All you have to do is recompile it. It is almost always the GUI stuff that is system specific. And if they already work on Windows 95 or Windows NT, the port is trivial. >Programs like Fritz, which are developed with assemblers won't >port without a huge effort so don't expect to see them. It's >the classic tradeoff, if you want the most compatibility and >comfort, you have to accept more performance constraints. You >also have to face your fears, superior products usually die >eventually because the lesser (usually lesser because it is OLDER) >product is the one that has the most intertia and the most hype. I would *really* love to try an EV6 machine with 8 cpu's running NT to see what it could do. While the Alpha machine has native 64 bit integers for the compiler, the OS is still 32 bit. I think a 64 bit port of NT will also be very helpful. Tablebase and opening book I/O would be improved, for instance.
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