I left Digital in 1994, so I don’t know much about the later evolution of the Alphaservers, but 1998 would have been about right for en EV-56 (EV-5 shrink) or EV-6. There’s a Wikipedia article about all the different systems but most of the dates are missing.
The white label parts are all PAL22V10-15s. The 8 square chips are cache SRAMS, and most the the SOIC jellybeans are bus transceivers to connect the CPU to RAM and I/O. The PC derived stuff is in the back corner. There are 16 DIMM slots to make two ranks of 54 bit RAM out of 8-bit DIMMs. We usually ran with a SCSI card, an ethernet, and an 8514 graphics card plugged into the riser.
What version of this would I have bought ca. 1998? I had 16 of some kind of Alpha nodes in AMD sockets, interconnected with SCI for encoding videos. I ended up writing and releasing what I think were the first open source drivers for SCI -- it took a long time to get Dolphin to let me release them.
The DIPs with white labels -- are those PALs or somethin? Or are the labels just to cover up part names :-)
On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 2:39 PM Lawrence Stewart <lstewart2@gmail.com> wrote:
Alphas in PC boxes! I dug around in the basement and found my Beta (photo attached).
This was from 1992 or 1993 I think. This is an EV-3 or EV-4 in a low profile PC box using pc peripherals. Dave Conroy designed the hardware, I did the console ROMS (BIOS equivalent) and X server, and Tom Levergood ported OSF-1. A joint project of DEC Semiconductor Engineering and the DEC Cambridge Research Lab. I think about 20 were built, and the idea kickstarted a line of low end Alphaservers.
This was a typical Conroy minimalist design, crunching the off-chip caches, PC junk I/O, ISA bus, and 64 MBytes of RAM into this little space. I think one gate array would replace about half of the chips.