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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Porter who wrote (36637)	9/2/1998 1:05:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580838

Are you on crack. You really need to check up on the industry before you make statement that are COMPLETELY INCORRECT like the following: Software emulation isn't going to cut it, and we all know that no software company out there is brave enough to try and make one version of an OS or application which will run on two different processors seamlessly. (Heck, even Java apps can't do that yet.) Well I guess Windows NT, Microsoft Word and Excel all don't exist huh. Thhose 3 are just a small chunk of both alpha and intel native programs available. And NT runs flawlessly on the Alpha. You missed my point, and you insult me for not doing my homework while blasting me on a point which you failed to take some time and understand. I KNOW that there are Alpha versions of Windows NT, MS Word, Excel, databases, etc. But do you think there's going to be one version which runs both on x86 and Alpha? I was referring to the reinstallation of just about everything if you upgrade from K7 to Alpha (assuming it's possible). Do you think it's going to be as simple as just popping in an Alpha in a slot A motherboard and taking off from there? NO! You're going to be reinstalling the OS, the applications, the drivers, etc. And that's only ASSUMING that there are Alpha versions of everything. If there isn't, well then you've got quite an upgrade task ahead of you. Perhaps software emulation of x86 can ease the transition somewhat, but this will create a huge performance impact. Know that this is much different from the upgrade paths from x86 and/or PA-RISC to Merced, since Merced is going to support hardware emulation of both. You won't have to reinstall your OS or software to move your server or workstation to Merced. (Of course, this brings up performance issues again, but at least the transition is a lot smoother than a hypothetical upgrade path from AMD K7 to Alpha.) Think about all this before assuming that just dropping in an Alpha in a Slot A workstation is as easy as dropping in an AMD K6-2 in a Socket 7 desktop. Tenchusatsu