Boxes Of Tat: Samsung UP1500 (Alpha EV68)

Samsung UP1500

Linux workstation motherboard based on the Alpha processor, manufactured by Samsung.

Specification

System Name	sarothamnus
Mainboard	Samsung UP1500 Rev. B
CPU	Alpha 21264B (EV68) 800MHz
RAM	1 GiB DDR-266 ECC (4 GiB max.)
Floppy	Mitsubishi Electric MF355F-3250MG, 3.5" 1.44MB
Storage	Digital KZPBA=CZ, QLogic ISP1040B, SCSI
	Seagate Cheetah X15 ST318451LW, 18 GB, Ultra-160 SCSI
	Acer Labs M1535D IDE
	Sony DDU1622, 16x DVD-ROM IDE
Video	Hercules 3D Prophet 7500 128MB, Dual Display (DVI, VGA & S-Video), AGP (ATI Radeon RV200)
Network	built-in Digital DE500-BA, 10/100Mb/s ethernet PCI
OS	Alpha Core 1.0 (Linux 2.6)

This board uses:

AMD-761 (aka. Irongate-2) northbidge:

DDR SDRAM memory with ECC support, max. 4 GiB

4 DIMM slots for PC133 DIMMs

4x AGP, 3.3V signaling only
32-bit, 33 MHz PCI bus

3 PCI slots
Intel 21143 (DEC Tulip) 10/100 ethernet
connection to southbridge

ALi M1535D+ southbridge:

dual UltraDMA-100 IDE
I2C
2 USB
2 serial (UART)
1 parallel (ECP, EPP & SP)
1 floppy controller (2 drives)
PS/2 keyboard & mouse
SoundBlaster compatible audio

The AMD-761 (aka. Irongate-2) northbridge was also used on AMD Athlon mainboards. Sadly the use of the Irongate chipset limited this board to Linux and BSD, since support wasn't present in Compaq/HP Tru64 or OpenVMS.

Supported AGP graphics cards are limited to those that support 3.3V signaling (AGP 2.0 added the 4x mode which uses 1.5V signaling, so this effectivly limits the slot to 1x and 2x AGP speeds). Compatibility issues with the SRM BIOS emulation (PC cards expect x86 hardware), also excludes some cards. The old AlphaLinux wiki provides a list of known to be supported cards: UP1500 Compatibility - Alpha Linux Wiki.

System Information

SRM Firmware

Reference output for SRM commands providing system information can be found in the Samsung UP1500 manual (Samsung UP1500 800-A1 Manuals | ManualsLib).

/proc/cpuinfo - Linux

Processor information:

cpu			: Alpha
cpu model		: EV68AL
cpu variation		: 7
cpu revision		: 0
cpu serial number	: 
system type		: Nautilus
system variation	: 0
system revision		: 0
system serial number	: 
cycle frequency [Hz]	: 796426275 est.
timer frequency [Hz]	: 1024.00
page size [bytes]	: 8192
phys. address bits	: 44
max. addr. space #	: 255
BogoMIPS		: 1586.36
kernel unaligned acc	: 0 (pc=0,va=0)
user unaligned acc	: 0 (pc=0,va=0)
platform string		: UP1500 796 MHz
cpus detected		: 1
L1 Icache		: 64K, 2-way, 64b line
L1 Dcache		: 64K, 2-way, 64b line
L2 cache		: 4096K, 1-way, 64b line
L3 cache		: n/a

A development of the EV6 (aka. 21264), the EV68AL (aka. 21264B) used the eighth generation production process (0.18 μm).