Heh, I didn't have to imagine. Got a GigE switch (expensive at the time) and 8 of the 164LX motherboards. Worked fine, but aged quickly since annual performan

Heh, I didn't have to imagine. Got a GigE switch (expensive at the time) and 8 of the 164LX motherboards. Worked fine, but aged quickly since annual performance increases on the PC were substantial, unlike today. Then HP released (1991 or so) the "snake" workstations hp-730, about twice as fast as main sun competition, and also faster (at least on our codes) than the 21064/21164. Had a crazy fast X11 implementation. One of our collaborators cried that it was faster to run things from our workstation remote to his $30k sun workstation than it was to run it local. HP rev'd the CPU in 1992 and brought out a HP-735, which was a cheap upgrade ($2,000 or so), which more than doubled the performance of the 730, added a much better SCSI system, doubled the clock, improved the cache, and improved the IPC. The floating point improvements were particularly noticeable. I attended the "1000x" Alpha announcement in 1992. They promised a revolutionary 64 bit architecture promising 10x from IPC, 10x from increased cores, and 10x from increased clocks. Most marketing compared it to Sun's sparcs, which made it look good. Compiler optimization support looked uneven, sure some benchmarks looked good, but our computational workloads (EEG and MRI processing) preferred our HP-735. Sadly around 1998 Dec (or maybe Compaq) decided not to sell the 264 through the same channels, so we ended up buying alphastation DS10s. But they were pricey, similar clock speeds, but around twice the performance of the 21164 because of various tweaks and moving to Out of Order execution. Then not long after AMD brought out their answer to the Itanium, with the x86-64 extension. Suddenly PCs could do "real" work with a single process handling over 4GB of ram. Moving the memory controller on chip, so dual sockets has 2 memory systems and NUMA instead of Intel's shared front side bus was another revolution. Said FSB seemed largely responsible for the "Intel servers are slow" when busy. Disk I/O, network I/O, or using the second socket would substantially slow CPU performance. All in all it was a pretty crazy decade that watched as the industry moved from single core, 100MHz, poor IPC, and 32 bit to multicore, 64 bit, over 1GHz, and much improved IPC. Sadly early 2000s were when Intel bluffed the industry into killing off alpha, pa-risc, (mostly) sparc, and mips for Itanium chips that shipped last, slow, and never hit their promised targets. For the first few years alpha matched itanium performance, despite having a huge process disadvantage.