Subject: RE: VAX limits ( was Re: VAX 6420: KA64A EEPROM and serial number
To: NetBSD/vax Mailing List <port-vax@netbsd.org>
From: Carlini, Antonio <Antonio.Carlini@riverstonenet.com>
List: port-vax
Date: 05/28/2001 03:55:29
> Brian Chase  wrote:
> 
	>According to some of the docs for legacy systems on the Compaq
website,
	>the VAX 6000-600 is listed as having a 1GB memory limit.
	>
	>  http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/vax/archive/vax6000_600.html

	The VAX 6000-600 (IIRC) had support for extended physical addresses.
	I don't know whether the real limit was 3.5GB and 1GB was just the
	supported limit (or the most you could reasonably get in) or
	whether the 1GB was a hard limit.

	I *think* the Mariah chip supports more than 512MB too but
	this was never supported on the VAX 6000-500 series.

	The VAX 9000 also could have more than 512MB or physical RAM
	but this too was never supported (I forget why, probably
	just far too expensive).

	>I'm not sure how accurate this is though, since they screwed up the
info
	>on the VAX 6000-400 which should be 512MB memory limit with a per
CPU
	>rating of ~7 VUPs, not the 3.8 listed.  They also fail to mention
that it
	>supports up to two vector processors.  It basically looks like
they've
	>duplicated the specs from the VAX 6000-300.
	>
	>  http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/vax/archive/vax6000_400.html

	Looks like it is a duplicate. (I'm pretty sure that, among other
things
	the VAX 6000-400 series have 128KB of off-chip cache not
	256KB like the CVAX 6000s).

	>Also of note, as can be seen on the main VAX page here,
	>
	>  http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/vax/archive/
	>
	>they mention the VAX 8974 and VAX 8978 systems.  I'd never heard of
these
	>boxes before.  Has anyone here ever seen one in the wild?  From the
specs
	>it sort of looks like they were sold as clustered systems, 4 x VAX
8810
	>for the VAX 8974 and 8x VAX 8810 for the VAX 8978.

	I've never seen one but that's exactly what they were. They were
never
	"real" machines, just groups of other machines.

	The VAXft 612 was really two clustered VAXft 610s (possibly in a big
box).

	>The VAX 7000 and VAX 10000 are listed as being able to support up
to 3.5GB
	>of RAM.  The VAX 6000-600 seems to be a bit of an oddball.

	I think the largest VAX 6000 memory board was 512MB (it might even
	have been just 256MB ... I don't have that info handy right now).
	Squeezing 7 memory boards in would not leave that many slots
	free for other things. (Particularly since it was normal to
	try to achieve a balance between CPU and memory).

	Antonio