[ale] DEC Alpha?

[steve]

I need to do some serious number crunching and am wondering if a dec alpha
is the right way to go.  I know it's got the horsepower, but what sort of
learning curve is there when going from linux(x86) -> linux(alpha)?  I plan
on using only freeware plus my own code, so I don't think I'll have to fool
with the x86 emulator stuff.

Is this a nightmare?  Should I just get a PII and be done with it?  I need
heavy floating point, and looking at the benchmarks from the DES Challenge
(http://www.frii.com/~rcv/desbench.htm), it looks like a 500MHz Dec alpha
would be nice :-)

TIA

Steve
sjd at mindspring.com