End Of The Line For Alpha 514
Scareduck writes "Infoworld reports HP has released the last iteration of the Alpha chip. I used these babies in the late 90's, and for a time, they were da bomb. Sadly, the economics weren't there, DEC management really didn't have much of a clue, and Alpha has, at long last, bit the dust. Alpha-based servers will continue to be sold through 2006, and supported through 2011. Farewell, Alpha; the world's line of chips seems to have declined to Intel and a handful of niche guys." Slashdot ran for the first 7 or 8 months off an Alpha box.
Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, better colors [slashdot.org].
Re:Sad (Score:2, Interesting)
When it comes to the PC market sure the Intel Chips are popular, but the Motorola chips are used far more in other technology applications. Like Telephone Switches, routers, calculators and so forth.
Do a little looking around. I have only ever seen Intel stamped on the backs of chips in the PC markets.
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
As long as there is competition for architectures, advancements in architecture will continue. Does it really matter that there is only one mainstream architecture?
Niche Guys? (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean small players like IBM? I guess the G5 and Power line of chips are not really big time enough to worry about?
Re:Beta (Score:5, Interesting)
"Do we get thier marketing people?" (Score:2, Interesting)
B-2 Memories, Management (Score:5, Interesting)
Then we switched over to a trouble report tracking program instead of doing everything on paper. The thing was implemented in house and made to run on the VAX'es. Suddenly everything slowed to a crawl, both development and trouble tracking. Since managers were the primary users of the tracking software, we knew it would have visibility. There was much rejoicing when the company bought a DEC Alpha...
...and put only the tracking software on it. No development work was allowed at all on teh new machine.
SIGH. The salad days of youth...
Re:Niche guys.... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I wouldn't say that AMD is an "Intel architecture", although they make a line of chips that implement an Intel ISA. Their new stuff is markedly different.
However, I admit that there are better examples of non-Intel architectures, such as those made by the small upstarts IBM and Motorola.
Re:Sad (Score:2, Interesting)
Umm, yeah. They've been at about 2-4% market share for as long as I can remember. They sure as hell aren't mainstream players.
Re:Will anyone actually be *using* this? (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, we're retiring a 1994-model DEC (yes, Digital!) Alpha 2100 with a 200 MHz (yes, that's megahertz) processor. The thing has run 24x7 for nearly 10 years and probably averaged less than a day downtime a year. We downed it only for hardware upgrades. We're replacing it with an DS 25, 2 processors, 2 GB RAM (our original had a whopping 64 MB when we bought it) and 5 36 GB drives (our original 2100 had 4 1 GB drives, and we were top stuff in town!). My, I'm feeling old.
Re:Niche guys.... (Score:1, Interesting)
And don't forget... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe that's why some contries banned [slashdot.org] Apple's misleading advertising!
A lot will be using this! (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyways, I haven't seen a lot of discussion on what happens to the IP (Intellectual Property) once HP puts the Alpha out to pasture for good. I'd like to see it released to the public domain or made "open source" so royalty-free implementations can continue to be made by a large number of third parties. It would be very cool if any Joe Blow could download the VHDL or Verilog files to synthisize their very own Alpha-core-based FPGAs!
Re:Niche guys.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The technology isn't even intel's, only the instruction set is. The technology in between fetch and store is all entirely different not only between AMD and Intel (at least since the K5, the Am-386 is not significantly different from the i386 as far as I know) but also between one generation of intel processor and the next - From what I understand there's not all that much difference between P2 and P3, but P3 and P4 are pretty different, as evinced by the fact that intel has decided that they have to base their next generation of processor (multi-core) on the Pentium M, which is based on the P3.
I agree entirely that we should not say intel architecture, and that we should be referring to the instruction set, because what with the current state of computing, an instruction set does not necessarily imply anything whatsoever about the processor architecture. We have come a long, long way since the four stage pipeline.
Re:AMD CPU's are using licensed Alpha tech (Score:4, Interesting)
The K6 used the Pentium bus. It was a drop-in replacement. Aanyone remember the Shuttle HOT-569 with the i430TX chipset? Mine has a K6-2 sitting in its little Socket 7.
The K7 aka Athlon did use the EV6 bus. I never understood why nobody made an Athlon=>Alpha shim board to run to run an K7 in an Alpha EV6 box or vice versa.
Re:Well (Score:2, Interesting)
HP used to make a lot of cool tools as well - Oscilliscopes and such.
Their calculators were very cool
They were in at the begginning of the laser printer market. My Laserjet III is still going strong (did have to replace the power supply once but that was a job I could do myself with a screwdriver)
They have a pretty good claim to having invented the personal computer even though they never sold huge numbers since they were aimed at labs rather than end users. IBM can also put in a claim on that front with their APL desktop machine (HP's ran Basic or their own algebraic langauge, depending on model). We are talking early to mid 70's here.
They used to make PCs that you could run over with a truck - I know someone who did that on a loading dock and it kept on working.
And they made a cool range of mini-computers (although their OS and compilers were somewhat of a pain to use). In at least one of the early models you could actually add your own instructions using writable control store.
Re:Shouldn't they rename it (Score:2, Interesting)
My favorite Alpha memory is being in the VMS group and being told that Ultrix wasn't going to be allowed to port to it. It was going to be a VMS-only chip. Of course, this was back in the 'UNIX is snake oil' days.
Re:Microprocessor Report (Score:3, Interesting)
When it came out Alpha was faster than any other CPU period, and not just faster but significantly more powerful than anything else in the market. Obviously you must have a very selective memory if you don't remember the early 90's and everyone lusting after Alpha big time. And that was a clear advantage, however DEC could not market themselves even if they were a free whore in a port.
" Decoding x86 is a major problem. See how many different solutions have been employed to do it since the PPro and K5.
* x86 chips are designed to the core to run x86. The fact that it breaks x86 into smaller instructions doesn't make it an Alpha beind a x86 decoder. It's like saying PPC970 is an Alpha behind a PowerPC decoder."
I have newsflash for you, x86 instructions have never been executed natively (most of them anyways), it is all microcode. This whole shebang of x86 "risc" core is from people who don't get it that all that the P6 is doing is using a leaner microcode that can be pipelined and superscaled.
The influence of the Alpha in the x86 comes from the fact that Intel did indeed buy out the Alpha technology after they settled their lawsuit with DEC, and a shitload of the Alpha team ended up developing for intel. Thus a lot of the internal pipeline technology ended up in the PIV et al... it doesn't make it an alpha, but some of the design principles are there.
Re:Microprocessor Report (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever seen a modern CPU? The caches are take up the bulk of the chip's area. And then there are the level 3 caches etc.
The additional complexity and space due to x86 support is overrated. Soon it'll just be like one of those vestigal limbs in whales or large snakes.
An instruction set that requires 20% more cache space but 20+% less instruction decoder etc space could actually use a lot more silicon overall and be slower.
The top 3 highest performing CPUs aren't RISC.
Or are you gonna say IBM's POWER is RISC? Some of the POWER instructions decode to microcode - call that RISC? Sounds like CISC.
Nowadays it's not a bad idea to have instructions that do lots and then decompress them to lots of micro-ops in the core of the CPU. POWER does that. AMD does that. Compare that with RISC's original concept of having everything in simplified ops/a reduced instruction set.
When you didn't have enough silicon space to put the equiv of a "gzip" on the chip, RISC was faster. But once there was space for a "gzip" (and bandwidth became an issue), CISC-style designs started to gain an advantage.
Re:Sad (Score:2, Interesting)
"Other" won every single engineering battle as the best architecture, but Intel brought rooks of vice presidents into every board room and convinced companies that Intel was the better choice, regardless of architecture.
Intel won.
Signed:
Operation Crushed.
Yes, AltaVista was Alpha's Child (Score:3, Interesting)
Enter the Internet Boom, DEC's last chance at a comeback. How do you market a capable platform around DEC's chimp-loving marketeers? Why, do something that Sun, IBM etc. cannot. Three researchers at DEC did just that, in the summer of 1995.
Yes, we know about AltaVista's bellyflop as a portal. It was painful. But AV sold "more than 1000" AlphaServer 8400s, at an average MSRP over $1M a pop. It succeeded as intended, in spite of the lukewarm financial support from DEC's unimaginitive senior management.
Re:amd is niche?? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's just neat. It's a 4 MIPS processor, and it costs about as much as the postage to mail it.
OpenSource Alpha! (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's say, conservatively, that DEC/CompaQ/HP sank $1B into Alpha design and it's current value in the market is (?) $500 million. Some tax guy do the calculations. 1/3 of $500 million might create a blip on HP's radar for a while.
OpenSource Alpha!
Check out...
www.opencores.com
M6890E (Score:4, Interesting)
Was possible to write reentrant and recursive code fairly easily directly in assembler.
Compared to the more popular (and brain dead, but somewhat fast 6502) the 6809 was the shit. --Glad I learned assembler on one. Learning that chip, and later the 68000, biased my view of CPUs forever. Intel looked like a sad, slow kludge in comparison.
Intel chips basically play the lotto. The faster you sift through the instructions, the more you will get done. Shove the bits in and let the cooling engineers sort 'em out. Blech.
Re:Slashdot History (Score:3, Interesting)
Damn I miss Sig11. Also, I couldn't be happier that Jon Katz is gone. Right after the Hellmouth series I put clicked the Ignore checkbox. I got sick of the daily buzzword soup with a thinly veiled attempt to pimp his new book. I didn't know he had finally gone away until about a year ago when someone mentioned it in another thread.
Ahhh, the good old days. Before the GNAA, before 1.2.3 Profit jokes, when people were seriously imagining Beowulf clusters of E2K machines, Naked Petrified Natalie Portman, before Hot Grits in people's trousers, before goatse.cx links, when we had numeric karma, before the karma cap, when I was a rank n00b instead of the worldly
LK