| ▲ | mepian a day ago |
| How was the Alpha a bad bet? x86-64 didn't exist yet, and the architecture was pretty solid technologically. It died because DEC died, not the other way around. |
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| ▲ | jabl 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > How was the Alpha a bad bet? Not technically (Alpha ISA had its good and bad sides, but was decent enough), but economically. DEC just didn't have the marketshare and thus economic muscle to survive in a game of ever increasing R&D costs for each successive generation. Hence DEC ending up acquired by Compaq, which then was acquired by HP. HP also saw the writing on the wall, and developed Itanium with Intel as a replacement for their PA-RISC, thinking that Itanium could benefit from Intel's huge economy of scale in chip manufacturing. And after acquiring Compaq (with DEC Alpha) it sunset the Alpha as well in favor of Itanium, for the same reasons. Well, we all know how the Itanium story turned out. |
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| ▲ | icedchai 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Alpha was so far ahead, compared to the other mid 90’s “workstation” vendors. I went to a university with tons of DEC hardware, then worked at a mostly DEC shop for a bit. It’s a shame DEC died. |
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| ▲ | LeFantome 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | I really loved the Alpha platform. It was not as fast as it felt like it should have been given the clock speed. It also seemed like a real memory pig compared to x86 at the time. That was probably just because it was 64 bit. Everything is a memory pig now I guess. :) Alpha boxes were cool. High clock speeds, massive amounts of RAM does the time, and huge storage. When they were the only 64 bit systems, they were the only game in town for some workloads. | | |
| ▲ | sillywalk 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > When they were the only 64 bit systems They were never the only 64 bit systems. MIPS introduced their 64 bit R4000 in 1991, a year before the Alpha came out. Sun released the 64 bit UltraSPARC in '95, along with IBM's 64bit PowerPC AS for their AS/400 systems. HP released the 64bit version of their PA-RISC in 1996. | |
| ▲ | icedchai 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In the late 90's, another engineer came up to me and said they had an Alpha with a couple gigs of RAM. That was almost unheard of for the time! My x86 laptop then had 32 megs. It's funny looking back at that now... Everything is a memory pig. | |
| ▲ | brazzy 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > It also seemed like a real memory pig compared to x86 at the time. That was probably just because it was 64 bit. Everything is a memory pig now I guess. :) Wasn't Alpha also a fairly pure RISC architecture, with larger machine code being an inherent property of that? |
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| ▲ | nickpsecurity a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| More details about how it went down here: https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/compaq-to-aban... ARM's and POWER's success suggests Alpha might have made it. Compaq wanted to partner on Itanium, though. Eventually, Intel got the Alpha I.P. rights which might as well have been a death sentence. Last Alpha I saw was the SAFE architecture that added security features to a homebrew CPU that was derived from Alpha ISA. What I liked most on Alpha, though, was PALcode with its atomic execution. |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nah. It was a totally different world. These companies were competing around proprietary advantages at the OS or hardware level that became less and less relevant over time. HP self-immolated itself and you were left with IBM and Sun. Only IBM survived, and that’s because it won key contracts in the 60s and 70s to run verticals and business systems, and essentially leveraged mainframe financing and legacy contracts to cross-sell everything. On the tech side, they parlayed that into a sustainable business by virtualizing everything and sharing the Power platform. They get some new business for AIX, but it’s mostly that legacy business. A good chunk of DEC’s and Compaq’s Business was running terminal (as in tty) operations for mainframes. That went endangered with NT 3.5 and extinct with NT 4. As Linux improved, Intel was good enough. ARM is doing to Intel what Intel did to everyone. |
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