Alpha died because HP decided that Itanium was the one true processor and killed PA-RISC and Alpha (which it had acquired) in favor of itanic. I'd love to live in a world where Alpha had been free to compete on merit. Who knows, maybe we'd all be running Alpha desktops and laptops.

DEC was (slowly) on its way to making alpha mass-market. Around the time of the Compaq acquisition, they started offering the CPU to 3rd parties to design their own boards. One example is the API UP1000, which had an AMD irongate chipset and an EV6 CPU. (I had an early sample that I ported FreeBSD/alpha to). Alpha was the only somewhat popular non-x86 platform that Windows NT ran on. FX!32 made it possible to run x86 apps, like Rosetta on Apple M4. Alpha was the first non-x86 linux port.. I was at the USENIX where John "Maddog" Hall gave Linus an Alpha (I think it was a Multia) Alpha was also the first 64-bit FreeBSD port (which I contributed to), and paved the way for amd64.

Alpha had a HUGE amount of momentum when HP summarily executed it. I still hate HP with a passion, and I still won't buy anything from them, 20+ years later.

▲

chasil 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I have heard that the Alpha architecture maintainers said that their options for improvements were limited, and themselves advocated ending development.

What I also know is that DEC chose ARM for low-power applications, because the design of the Alpha was simply not capable of scaling to lower power usage.

"According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM

Power efficiency was soon to become a chief concern. This alone would have ended the Alpha.

▲

sillywalk 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> I have heard that the Alpha architecture maintainers said that their options for improvements were limited, and themselves advocated ending development.

Interesting. One of the main design principles for the Alpha was for longevity, and to have a thousand-times increase in performance over 25 years.[0]

[0] https://danluu.com/dick-sites-alpha-axp-architecture.pdf

▲

chasil 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm only halfway through the Mashey thread, but this is an interesting assertion, leading to what I think can and cannot be done (in my profound state of ignorance):

"ONE LAST TIME: it wasn't politics that ended the VAX, it was engineering judgement by excellent (IMHO) DEC engineers, and the economics of doing relatively low-volume chips [low-volume compared to X86]. Nobody could afford to keep the VAX ISA competitive at DEC volumes...."

In contrasting this against Intel, what x86 could always obtain was and is performance. A large base of buyers will enable architectural improvements.

As an example, Bob Colwell was brought in to implement out of order opcode/microcode execution in the Pentium Pro. This was contemplated for the VAX, but never seriously entertained.

What could not be added to the Alpha was power efficiency, and x86 finds itself regularly beaten in this race as well.

It seems that money can buy only some things. Performance can be bought, but efficiency cannot.

___

EDIT: I have read this before, but it's always funny.

MIPS was the most provocative and frightening thing in high performance computing in the 80's and early 90's.

"IBM, DEC, and HP were among the few that actually had the expertise to do CMOS micro technology, albeit not without internal wars. [I was invovled in dozens of these wars. One of the most amusing was when IBM friends asked me to come and participate in a mostly-IBM-internal conference at T. J. Watson, ~1992. What they really wanted, it turned out, was for somebody outside IBM politics (i.e., "safe") to wave a red flag in front of the ECL mainframe folks, by showing a working 100Mhz 64-bit R4000.]"

	▲	TMWNN 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was struck by that quote, too. Set aside IBM inventing RISC in the first place. How was it possible that in 1992, two years after RS/6000 hit the market and made IBM a first-class RISC workstation player—a peer of Sun and HP in terms of tech and sales—did IBM people still feel the need to resort to the subterfuge of a non-IBM engineer showing off a non-IBM RISC CPU to the IBM mainframe folks to give them a kick in the butt? The mind boggles.