#Amiga Voyager ?
4 messages in this thread
speaking of Alphas… DEC seems to have a similar problem like Commodore (back
in the olden times …) – they offer computers with "more bang for the buck"
i.e. more power for less money than the competition – and it doesn't sell!
Maybe computer buyers regard it as suspicious if anyone offers more for less
than the so-called "industry standard"?
// Christian "ELP" Busse
\X/ near Frankfurt, Germany
Hi Cris
It depends on what you mean by "no one is buying them".
Dec Alpha's are not cheap, and most people in the home market
just won't pay the price for so much speed.
They run under windows NT, again, not a "home market" item.
The cheapest way to go that I've found so far is to buy a Dec PCXL 466D2,
for about $3,023.00, then trade your daughterboard in (500.00 rebate),
and purchase the Alpha AXP 233MHz daughterboard, about 3000.00, minus rebate.
The total outlay is 5,523.00,for a machine with with only 8 meg of ram.( Grant
Boucher
recomends 64 meg )
Of course, it's 2.5 times faster than a pentium 90MHz, so it's a good move
if time is money. (These prices are from the DEC winter 94 catalog )
I am currently looking to add DEC Alpha's to my sales line up,
but the wholesale prices I am finding so far are hardley worth the risk. (pun
intended 🙂
Like you said, limited sales potential, although I belive that I could move a
few systems.
See ya'
Mike Brennan, Sir Render A/V
As you allude, Alphas are really competing in a different market (by design or
accident – don't know which). They are at the low end of the market for SMP –
which is about the high end of NT. Now, most people I know of do not thing
Alpha when they think NT. If they are doing small SMP work (100 user RDBMS,
for example) and it happens to require NT, they usually do not think DEC.
Alternatives are the RS6000 and related servers. When you think – in this
market – of small non-NT servers, you think unix, i.e., RS6000, etc. Again,
not Alpha. Smaller systems (unixware, unix, WFW, NT non-power user, etc) are
generally the market inhabited by the intel-chained masses, who would know an
alpha if it bit them. Finally, the larger multiprocessing base are looking at
bigger systems than the Alpha can handle. I know sparcs are old hat, but I
would really like to see a DEC Alpha try to keep pace with a 20-processor
SparcServer 2000. Beyond that, the pyramids, sequents, etc. will leave the
Alpha in the dust.
Thus, the only market DEC has for the Alpha, is the just-a-little-beyond
Pentium market. Those people are generally the ones who will try to eek out
just-a-little-more than the Pentium can handle, and survive until P6 arrives –
and will never try an Alpha.
Hi Kurt.
Yes, I would tend to agree, the DEC (and R4600 MIPS systems) are a good
stepping stone for peole like me who need beyond pentium power at a
"reasonable" price.(I would like to see specs on an 060 though)
Like I said, a limited market.
Mike Brennan, Sir Render A/V