I had a really good time making that video! Hopefully I'll make it out your way again. I also posted a short showing the pricing for this computer in November 2004. th-cam.com/users/shortsjLI5WGsFbWc
I weighed the DEC 3000 model 500 that was on the desk behind me in the intro... 88.7 pounds. I fully believe that ES47 was 50% heavier. It was difficult for the two of us to lift together. So. Much. Steel.
@@Fifury161 The laptop (a Framework laptop with a quad-core i7-1165G7) is many times faster than the ES47. I could probably benchmark building the ES47's kernel on it to get an actual number.
Thanks for the video. I'm from a Networking Team, our Server guys were pulling these out recently at work and I was curious what they actually did. Great video!
My first job right out of high school in '99 was building Alpha Linux servers, and I want to say it was around RedHat 6.0 (before RHEL was a thing). I remember having to build a bunch of them for a clustered environment Bloomberg ordered... I miss that architecture so much!
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Not off the top of my head, but I know for a fact that I had to Dremel a bit off the bottom of the heatsink because it was interfering with the boards we were using. They were big CPUs that looked like NeoGEO cartridges.
Brings back memories of an old RS/6000 server I've got under a bed somewhere. 45kg of sheer IBM steel. Had to shuffle it around on cardboard. Getting it upstairs involved planks and rope.
Thank you guys so much for putting up this video. It's pretty much the only detailed teardown of one of these ES47 servers in English and it was a livesaver when I needed to do a repair on one of these that's still in service a few weeks ago. Cheers!
this is cool...the place where i was working in the late 90s we were given 3 DEC alpha servers. it was my first exposure to non-x86 architecture. we ran NT4 on it and was rock solid. the software we had was available for alpha so got good use out of it. was a great CPU for its time
Once you get NT4 installed on an Alpha, it is really solid. I put NT4 on a different Alpha last year (th-cam.com/video/B8ioMNmmd2o/w-d-xo.html), and it was a harrowing experience. I want to revisit that system one of these days...
Amazing video !!! Really enjoyed it. Brings to my memory when my wife was the admin of two colossal alphas (we cannot recall the model) where Altavista (remember this, before Google??) was running for the Spanish market. Hope to see your Alpha (naked) very soon 😀
Because it seems not to be common knowledge: The reason why Noctua fans are more silent is primarily because they move less air - and that's not what you want in a server system where you need tons of airflow.
Yeah, Noctua was just the first name that popped into my mind. Part of the noise problem is that case is designed to house a bunch of hot, 10k RPM SCSI drives. With only one drive or using SSDs, the cooling needs are greatly reduced. I do wonder how much air the installed fans actually move. Hm...
Check out the Paricon interposer material. It is an elastomer material that has silver spheres suspended in it and, amazingly, it is only conductive in the Z-axis! It is rated for very high frequencies and so could be a possible alternative if the CPU interposer ever fails.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Not that I remember. Our ES45's also had 3 CPU's each which I can't remember any other system supporting. Loudest system I remember was our IBM Power 880's in performance mode. You could hear them over anything else in the data center for several rows. IBM said they made their SE's wear hearing protection when working on them.
blade centers are super loud too. can pick out one blade center from an isle of 10 racks. walking down the row, your clothing is blown away and you know exactly where the blade center is.
Also an interesting machine or machines, it is a nice colletion :) Hope you've solved your problem with your DEC 3000/500 from your other video in the meantime. I posted my commend there before I watched it to the end.
My first system break in was a Digital alpha box too lol... it was a local ISP and I told them how I got in and how to fix it and they have me free dialup for a year. 👌
I do utilise an IBM x3950x5 in 2-node, 8 decacore E7-8870 XEONs within my home IaaS it would be a fair comparison to the alpha, t'hehh amazing machine!
That's a bit more than even the dual E5-2699 v3 (18 cores each CPU, 72 threads total) that I use at work... and I'm already glad I don't have to pay the power bill for that beast.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff it's was loud in demo mode. If you set the sound amp to normal it would be louder than all the other cabinets in the arcade. I joke that if you cranked the amp to max on a KI cab, everyone in a 2 mile radius would know, someone has a K.I cabinet.
It would be interesting to know how much faster or slower this is, compare to a Raspberry Pi4 with an SSD drive connected via USB3. Does anyone have an idea?
@@mattst88 That's pretty cool. I was support on Colorbus products for a number of years, Still have an Indigo and O2. My Indy case just crumbled - weirdest thing.
"Need" is a funny word. :) Both Matt and I develop open source graphics drivers for a living. Playing around with a fast PCI graphics card on a fast Alpha is interesting.
No. Compaq killed Windows on Alpha in August 1999 so the last version to officially support the Alpha was 32bit Windows 2000 RC2. Without Compaq being onboard providing firmware support, writing HALs, licensing the compiler backend, etc, Microsoft could not continue supporting Windows on that hardware.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Yeah, the AlphaServer DS20 was the last machine to have any official Windows support though the DS10 is apparently similar enough to work despite it not being supported. Some later machines may still have ARC/AlphaBIOS firmware but its likely only there for running existing ARC utilities (eg, raid config) as without a HAL windows won't run. There is also 64bit Windows 2000/XP for Alpha. This was originally planned to see a public release at the same time as, or possibly before, the Itanium version but of course plans changed when Compaq quit. Microsoft still needed 64bit hardware to test Windows on though and Itanium wasn't ready so they kept building for Alpha anyway. A build of this from mid-2000 recently surfaced though as its unable to run 32bit Alpha binaries its not terribly useful.
@davidgoodwin6138 That's interesting. I'll have to see if I can find that "for research purposes." :) MS wasn't the only ones using Alpha as their 64-bit porting vehicle for Itanium. Sequent was doing the same thing with ptx. There's some irony here. :(
There are at least some people who were working on stuff like that in 2004 who are still in their 40s. 😆 I have some plans to interview a few people I know who worked on foundational stuff back in the day. There are a lot of stories that are on the brink of being lost.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff it’s true. I remember my dad bringing home the big ceramic hard drive plates. It would be funny if the fate of the world rest in some old legacy hardware with a technician on Medicare.
Looking at some of the service manuals, I believe the fans are 48V DC. Maybe @mattst88 can provide some more details, but I cannot find any information about the specifics of those fans.
That's an interesting idea, but I don't think so for a couple of reasons: - the power supplies are just single-phase - I think there were DC-DC power supplies for the system - the specs for the fan I've seen all say 48V DC I wonder if the extra wires could be for redundancy or something... Looking at my browser history, I believe the 7-pin fan is a Delta Electronics Sensflow FFC1348CE. I think its dimensions are 127x127x38 mm, and it is 48V 1.05A (50.4 Watts!). From photos online, the wires are: white, blue, yellow, 2x black, 2x red.
This is me and my AlphaServer ES47, if anyone has questions!
I had a really good time making that video! Hopefully I'll make it out your way again.
I also posted a short showing the pricing for this computer in November 2004. th-cam.com/users/shortsjLI5WGsFbWc
Fact for you, these weigh 132 pounds, ship weight was 164 (i worked for hp at the time in their enterprise division)
I weighed the DEC 3000 model 500 that was on the desk behind me in the intro... 88.7 pounds. I fully believe that ES47 was 50% heavier. It was difficult for the two of us to lift together. So. Much. Steel.
In terms a raw compute power, how would the laptop you used as a terminal compare?
@@Fifury161 The laptop (a Framework laptop with a quad-core i7-1165G7) is many times faster than the ES47.
I could probably benchmark building the ES47's kernel on it to get an actual number.
Thanks for the video. I'm from a Networking Team, our Server guys were pulling these out recently at work and I was curious what they actually did. Great video!
My first job right out of high school in '99 was building Alpha Linux servers, and I want to say it was around RedHat 6.0 (before RHEL was a thing). I remember having to build a bunch of them for a clustered environment Bloomberg ordered... I miss that architecture so much!
That's really cool! Do you remember what kind of systems they were? 164LX or something like that?
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Not off the top of my head, but I know for a fact that I had to Dremel a bit off the bottom of the heatsink because it was interfering with the boards we were using. They were big CPUs that looked like NeoGEO cartridges.
Oh! Those were "slot B" 21264 processors. Those are very cool. I'd love to have one of those in the collection.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Good memory! Thanks for refreshing mine Iol. 😜
That's some heavy metal! And wow! The countdown to leaf blower fan once it kicked on was no joke! LOL!
When I started editing the video, I forgot when the exact moment of initial fan blast was... and I jumped.
Brings back memories of an old RS/6000 server I've got under a bed somewhere. 45kg of sheer IBM steel. Had to shuffle it around on cardboard. Getting it upstairs involved planks and rope.
For a while when I was working at IBM, I had a POWER4 system as my "daily driver." It was fast, but not fast enough to justify the hearing loss.
What a great video! Only part I didn't enjoy was wanting one to install Gentoo on myself at the end :)
The struggle is real. 😆 I've felt that way after watching many TH-cam videos.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff I'll take a livestream of you and Matt installing it instead if you both have a spare week ;)
Thank you guys so much for putting up this video. It's pretty much the only detailed teardown of one of these ES47 servers in English and it was a livesaver when I needed to do a repair on one of these that's still in service a few weeks ago. Cheers!
That is awesome! I'm really glad we could help!
this is cool...the place where i was working in the late 90s we were given 3 DEC alpha servers. it was my first exposure to non-x86 architecture. we ran NT4 on it and was rock solid. the software we had was available for alpha so got good use out of it. was a great CPU for its time
Once you get NT4 installed on an Alpha, it is really solid. I put NT4 on a different Alpha last year (th-cam.com/video/B8ioMNmmd2o/w-d-xo.html), and it was a harrowing experience. I want to revisit that system one of these days...
Amazing video !!! Really enjoyed it. Brings to my memory when my wife was the admin of two colossal alphas (we cannot recall the model) where Altavista (remember this, before Google??) was running for the Spanish market. Hope to see your Alpha (naked) very soon 😀
AltaVista... now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. Lol. It seems like all the "classic" web services were either run on Alphas or SPARCs.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Yep !. A search engine, running on a magnificent and giant Alpha 🙂
Because it seems not to be common knowledge: The reason why Noctua fans are more silent is primarily because they move less air - and that's not what you want in a server system where you need tons of airflow.
Yeah, Noctua was just the first name that popped into my mind. Part of the noise problem is that case is designed to house a bunch of hot, 10k RPM SCSI drives. With only one drive or using SSDs, the cooling needs are greatly reduced. I do wonder how much air the installed fans actually move. Hm...
Check out the Paricon interposer material. It is an elastomer material that has silver spheres suspended in it and, amazingly, it is only conductive in the Z-axis! It is rated for very high frequencies and so could be a possible alternative if the CPU interposer ever fails.
Always wear your OSHA-Approved slippers when moving really heavy stuff around!
Safety first. Always. Lol.
Enjoyed this!
I always like to hear that. :) More Alpha processor videos soon.
We had ES40 abd ES45's running OpenVMS. Always dreamed of getting a ES47.
ES45 is nothing to sneeze at either. Were those also super loud?
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Not that I remember. Our ES45's also had 3 CPU's each which I can't remember any other system supporting. Loudest system I remember was our IBM Power 880's in performance mode. You could hear them over anything else in the data center for several rows. IBM said they made their SE's wear hearing protection when working on them.
Hearing protection is a must in any data center. Computer fan noise is not one of the "cool kids" ways to lose your hearing. :)
blade centers are super loud too. can pick out one blade center from an isle of 10 racks. walking down the row, your clothing is blown away and you know exactly where the blade center is.
I'm picturing a Marilyn Monroe moment... but with jeans and a hoodie. Not quite the same. :)
The invention of the wheel wasn't all that much. What mattered was the invention of the second wheel.
Also an interesting machine or machines, it is a nice colletion :) Hope you've solved your problem with your DEC 3000/500 from your other video in the meantime. I posted my commend there before I watched it to the end.
Now I know what happened to the Roswell Alien technology xd
No wonder they crashed! That's a lot of weight to drag across the galaxy! :)
@@TalesofWeirdStuff
:)
That very same model server was the first "fast" system that I ever broke into. :)
Ha! That's awesome. What OS was on it?
@@TalesofWeirdStuff OSF/1. I want to say it was 1.3? It was a very long time ago.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff You know what would be amazing? Get the Symbolics LISP Machine emulator and run it on that. :)
My first system break in was a Digital alpha box too lol... it was a local ISP and I told them how I got in and how to fix it and they have me free dialup for a year. 👌
@@livefreeprintguns I can't say that I was as altruistic. It did end up being a great career path, however. lol
I was given one of these and a stack of spare memory a couple of years ago hoping to tinker with some OpenVMS, still waiting to be turned on :(
I know that feeling. I have sooo many projects in the "I bought the neat thing, but I've never turned it on" stage.
I do utilise an IBM x3950x5 in 2-node, 8 decacore E7-8870 XEONs within my home IaaS it would be a fair comparison to the alpha, t'hehh amazing machine!
That's a bit more than even the dual E5-2699 v3 (18 cores each CPU, 72 threads total) that I use at work... and I'm already glad I don't have to pay the power bill for that beast.
So it's the "Killer instinct"(Arcade) of the Server world.
I never played that game very much. Did it have loud fans too?
@@TalesofWeirdStuff it's was loud in demo mode.
If you set the sound amp to normal it would be louder than all the other cabinets in the arcade.
I joke that if you cranked the amp to max on a KI cab, everyone in a 2 mile radius would know, someone has a K.I cabinet.
Subscribed, liked, I'm in - great video!
I'm glad you liked it! I have some more Alpha content coming.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff no worries! Whatever it is, I just like watching good computer videos on TH-cam. Just do your thing and have fun!
Change Your psswd to something memorable and brings back happy memories.
This level of overkill is fascinating. Todays equivalent would be e.g. IBM z and POWER i guess..
What going with 16x256GB ATA Crucial_CT256MX1 might be alright.
It would be interesting to know how much faster or slower this is, compare to a Raspberry Pi4 with an SSD drive connected via USB3. Does anyone have an idea?
That laugh @ 27:32 🙂
🤣🤣🤣 I literally LOLed. I knew it was going to be loud, but... boy, howdy, I was not expecting that!
The Indy on the bottom. Is that an old Cyclone from Colorbus? What is the one above it with the red dot?
I'm not sure. Maybe @mattst88 can help out with some details. I know he has been collecting those (and other SGIs) for quite some time.
Yes to Cyclone from Colorbus.
The red badge is a WebFORCE badge. I think WebFORCE Indys came with extra software for web publishing.
@@mattst88 That's pretty cool. I was support on Colorbus products for a number of years, Still have an Indigo and O2. My Indy case just crumbled - weirdest thing.
Thanks for sharing! So this was the first version of vmware?
VMS should work unless it is a different processor to the DEC VAX 750S.
C/C++ will compile down so fast it will make your eyes water.
Why do you need a better gfx card in an alpha server?
"Need" is a funny word. :) Both Matt and I develop open source graphics drivers for a living. Playing around with a fast PCI graphics card on a fast Alpha is interesting.
That would let you blow everyone else out of the game you would have so much computing power.
seven-wire fan... 1. Phase-A, 2. Phase-B, 3. Phase-C, 4. Tach, 5. PWM, 6. Ground, and 7. could be 5 volts *(just a guess, not a pinout!)
I wonder if it could run Windows Server 2003
No. Compaq killed Windows on Alpha in August 1999 so the last version to officially support the Alpha was 32bit Windows 2000 RC2. Without Compaq being onboard providing firmware support, writing HALs, licensing the compiler backend, etc, Microsoft could not continue supporting Windows on that hardware.
I don't know about Win2k, but I'm pretty sure WinNT doesn't run on anything beyond a 21164.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Yeah, the AlphaServer DS20 was the last machine to have any official Windows support though the DS10 is apparently similar enough to work despite it not being supported. Some later machines may still have ARC/AlphaBIOS firmware but its likely only there for running existing ARC utilities (eg, raid config) as without a HAL windows won't run.
There is also 64bit Windows 2000/XP for Alpha. This was originally planned to see a public release at the same time as, or possibly before, the Itanium version but of course plans changed when Compaq quit. Microsoft still needed 64bit hardware to test Windows on though and Itanium wasn't ready so they kept building for Alpha anyway. A build of this from mid-2000 recently surfaced though as its unable to run 32bit Alpha binaries its not terribly useful.
@davidgoodwin6138 That's interesting. I'll have to see if I can find that "for research purposes." :)
MS wasn't the only ones using Alpha as their 64-bit porting vehicle for Itanium. Sequent was doing the same thing with ptx. There's some irony here. :(
What about an ATI/AMD AIO WONDER CARD (Sorry for shouting) would be a great idea but would let you watch TV while playing DOOM.
soooo... can it play crysis?
I see you're wearing your steel-toe moccasins. :)
The people that designed these are 60+ years old now.
There are at least some people who were working on stuff like that in 2004 who are still in their 40s. 😆 I have some plans to interview a few people I know who worked on foundational stuff back in the day. There are a lot of stories that are on the brink of being lost.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff it’s true. I remember my dad bringing home the big ceramic hard drive plates. It would be funny if the fate of the world rest in some old legacy hardware with a technician on Medicare.
Somebody has to service the 8" floppy drives with the launch codes on them... Lol
Are the 7 pin fans 3 phase?
Looking at some of the service manuals, I believe the fans are 48V DC. Maybe @mattst88 can provide some more details, but I cannot find any information about the specifics of those fans.
That's an interesting idea, but I don't think so for a couple of reasons:
- the power supplies are just single-phase
- I think there were DC-DC power supplies for the system
- the specs for the fan I've seen all say 48V DC
I wonder if the extra wires could be for redundancy or something...
Looking at my browser history, I believe the 7-pin fan is a Delta Electronics Sensflow FFC1348CE. I think its dimensions are 127x127x38 mm, and it is 48V 1.05A (50.4 Watts!).
From photos online, the wires are: white, blue, yellow, 2x black, 2x red.
Can it run a minecraft server?
I feel like that's more the domain of @ActionRetro, but that's an interesting idea. "Loudest Minecraft Server Ever."
yes, not a great one though
@@TalesofWeirdStuff I'm a fan of his channel... one of the few TH-camrs to cover OpenBSD in a video.
He has a lot of good stuff on his channel. I met him at VCF East. Nice guy.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff I've probably run into him, didn't know it though
you can always drag on the ground
I'll give you 3.50$ for it
I have a louder server
Don't keep us in suspense... what is it?
fully populated HP C7000 blade enclosure
@@TalesofWeirdStuff And an IBM BladeCenter E and S which are sparsely populated
Pfff... All i wanted was to waste some more time on yt, and then google's evil algorithm does this to me.
The other one i have is: So this is what you look like sober ;p
As far as you know. 😂🤣
That thing makes as much noise as my ES40! fwoh. db level denotes quality. It's glorious.
With servers, I guess they figure it will be hidden in a room somewhere, so 10% more cooling is worth 100% noise. Push the limits!
@@TalesofWeirdStuff It's certainly the way at my work. The fact that the door to server rooms all "close" is a huge feature.