It just occurred to me that instead of buying a radiator I could have brought my HP 9000 C200 #workstation. It probably heats just as well… (Downside: it’s loud, like, really loud.)
@true_mxp ah.. the Rolls Royce powered 8086.
I wonder why "hey, spool up the beast" as a phrase never caught on
@skanman The PA-8200 processor was code-named “Vulcan.” Very fitting!
@true_mxp oooh those chips were almost 64-bit... Not very common.. usually for special use.
@skanman Not just almost :-)
@true_mxp they could execute 64-bit code, but the chip wasn't natively 64, it could natively do 40 I think, and used extensions to preprocess 64 instructions into executable code. I'm not a 100% sure. But I know it's extended instruction set was magical for scaling, it's a monster for it's time.
@skanman I think it’s only one of the address buses that was only 40 bits wide. But I’m no expert either ;-)
@true_mxp Wow look at that!.. full 64-bit. I bet those machines could crunch back in the day.. I see where my confusion came in. The only exotic chips I played with were from Alpha Digital, and some Power PCs. But you know what's a shame? Later in life I got into Unix / Linux but all those exotic computers only had NT or 2000. There were some slick OS's I wanted to play with but never got the chance.
@skanman Thanks :-) Wikipedia says on the PA-8000 (which also applies to the PA-8200): “The external interface is the Runway bus, a 64-bit address and data multiplexed bus. The PA-8000 uses a 40-bit physical address, thus it is able to address 1 TB of physical memory.”
HP 9000 (later branded “Visualize”) workstations were designed to run HP-UX. The C200 can run either version 10.20 (32 bit) or 11.x (64 bit). Good overview: https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-visualize_c200_c240_c360.html.