CHARON-AXP System Requirements

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Alpha Hardware Virtualization requires a 64-bit capable platform to run on adequately. This means a 64-bit processor system and a 64-bit operating system. CHARON-AXP is designed to run on Windows 2003 x64, Windows 2008 x64, Vista x64 and Windows 7 x64 which is supported by AMD and Intel processor systems.

Alpha Hardware Virtualization Software emulates a single CPU Alpha system and therefore claims one of the CPU's on the host system for that emulation task. The second CPU is assigned to all other system tasks like networking and system housekeeping, but it will also be used for emulator pre-processing tasks and I/O.

A dual CPU system is required to run the Alpha Emulator and both AMD and Intel are manufacturing dual core processors that have two CPU's on one chip. Please note that hyper-threading on Intel may appear as a dual CPU system, but the performance benefit of that option is insufficient for Alpha Emulation.

All product variants provide performance slightly above the speed of the original hardware when run on a dual CPU 3 GHz host system

Emulated Alpha hardware components:

  • Alpha processors: 21064 (EV4), 21164 (EV5), 21264 (EV6)
  • 4 GB emulated Alpha memory, expandable with 4 GB chunks to the maximum of the original Alpha
  • PCI-bus
  • Ethernet adapter (max 4)
  • SCSI adapter (max 10)
  • disks
  • SCSI tapes
  • RX28 Floppy disk
  • RRD47 CD-ROM
  • Serial Lines adapter (8 ports)

Host system requirements:

  • dual-core 3 GHz Intel or AMD CPU
  • Memory: 2 GB + amount of emulated Alpha memory
  • 1 Ethernet adapter per virtual Ethernet link
  • Storage subsystem (SATA, SCSI, iSCSI, SAN, NAS)
  • CD-ROM

There is no graphics subsystem emulation since there are numerous X-Windows emulator packages available on the market that can be used in conjunction with the Alpha Emulator when graphics terminal support is required. (Reflection-X and eXcursion are just two examples of this X-Windows emulation software).