On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 14:49 -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > Paul G. Allen wrote: > > On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 16:17 -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > > > >> Well, it served its purpose. It wiped out MIPS, SGI, HP, and DEC as > >> microprocessor competitors and left only IBM. > > > > Actually, Compaq killed the Alpha, not Intel. DIGITAL was ready to > > release a new, far faster Alpha when Compaq purchased them and killed > > it. > > Speaking as one of the Alpha designers, that's a little off. > > There was no mythical "far faster" Alpha coming out. EV-8 was to be > multithreaded even then because the circuit designers and architects > were at the limit. The circuit designers and architects had already > wrung the fat out of gates and circuits. Gains were going to come with > increasing difficulty.
Interesting. The benchmarks I saw at the time showed the EV8 at about (IIRC) 4 times faster than the same speed (as in clock speed) PIII (the PIII being the fastest Intel CPU at the time). > > In addition, Compaq may have "officially" killed Alpha, but the death of > Alpha was the selling of the fab to Intel. Once Intel had the fab, they > weren't exactly motivated to help Alpha. So, Alpha had to change to the > IBM fabs. That cost time and money at a critical point. > > However, the biggest failure was EV-6 (21264). A 300+MHz Alpha released > when Intel was still sitting at 66MHz would have provided momentum. > Instead, EV-6 got held up for two years due to ego wars between several > of the key folks. Yeah, EV-6 eventually came out at 500MHz, but by then > Intel had Pentium Pro's at 200MHz. Instead of a 6-fold (roughly) > performance improvement at about a 4-fold price bump, Alpha only had > about a factor of 2 for about a factor of 10 price difference. My 200 MHz 21264 system was faster than my PIII 800MHz system. (I still have that system with Linux installed on it, but as for performance, it was eclipsed by Intel and AMD systems years ago.) Yes, the price tag was a bit higher (OK, more than a bit. ;) ) When it came to number crunching, nothing beat an Alpha, which made them really nice for graphics (which is what I worked on at DIGITAL - graphics workstations using Alpha and PPC running UNIX and NT). The 21264 systems sold far better than the 21164 systems, so I wouldn't call the 21264 a failure. I still recall the saying "Alpha. The fastest processor nobody's ever heard of." > > > Samsing continued to make processors for some time, but even those > > may be no more. > > Samsung is ... interesting. Samsung wants nothing less than the total > domination and subjugation of Intel. Making Alpha's was expected to be > a step along that path. > There was a time there when I though I might still be able to get a faster Alpha through Samsung. Alas, it never happened. :( At least AMD was able to leverage some of the Alpha architecture in their CPUs, so at least something of the Alpha remains. PGA -- Paul G. Allen BSIT/SE Owner/Sr. Engineer Random Logic Consulting www.randomlogic.com -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
