Alpha Up For Grabs?

A number of people have been writing about Compaq selling off the Alpha processor, with some coverage from different media sources. The Inquirer cites Intel as the likely buyer, which seems odd to me considering their aversion to antitrust lawsuits. Maybe AMD? Who knows - it's too bad that the Alpha technology has never realized the same commercial success as it has technologically.

Comments

Re:Why Intel or AMD?

[Black Parrot]

> I would think it would be a lot of money to buy a product that would not be that useful to either company except to maybe get some ideas on improving there own chips.

Actually, most of the ideas are readily accessible in published papers. There may be some patents locked up in the Alpha, but I doubt that there are any secrets.

> I dont think there would be a large market for the Alpha being that Compaq and DEC could do nothing with the chip.

DEC was renowned for nothing so much as their inability to market good products. Dunno about Compaq, but without an NT for it I can't imagine that they would know what to do with it (which probably explains this article).

Your VIA suggestion sounds good. However, I think it would be a shrewd move for AMD too, if they're in a position to market it at a more competitive price than it traditionally has been.

Also, parts of AMD's architecture has been converging with parts of the Alpha's (even on Athlons), so AMD might be able to integrate it into the high end of a "family" of processors.

However, another question also arises. The Alpha has been around for, what, a decade or so now? Possibly the architecture is nearing the end of its life cycle, and if so no one is going to want to spend much to acquire it.

Anyone know how many more years they can squeeze hot stuff out of the Alpha? And is there any margin for cutting the price a bit?

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Intel: Alpha vs IA-64

[NovaX]

My question is, why? I didn't believe this when I read it earlier, and still not now. The Alpha is a viable architecture, proven and powerful. Intel could gain patents and technology, but I thought these issues were, for the most part, resolved years ago in a secret settlement. Intel bought DEC's fabs, DEC dropped lawsuits against Intel over the P5 and other 'things.'

So Ace's says that the newest compilation of SPEC outperforms the Itanium (Merced). I think the Merced has a lot of potential, in the fact that it isn't the cleanest design (more of a proof of concept and a 1st attempt to learn from), and that I doubt the Intel compiler is very up to par. Yet it still gives an impressive performance, if you believe SPEC.

IA-64 and Alpha are both viable at scientific applications, and from the latest Compaq compiler, they are relatively equal in their current forms. The Alpha wouldn't die because of the 3rd party consortium (forget name: APR?). And I've read claims that many of the best engineers left when Compaq bought DEC and moved to AMD amongst others. So, what is the major gain Intel would get from this?


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Why Intel or AMD?

[cansecofan22]

I can treally see why either Intel or AMD would want to spend the $$ on Alpha. They both have there own 64 bit CPU's finished (or nearly finished). I would think it would be a lot of money to buy a product that would not be that useful to either company except to maybe get some ideas on improving there own chips. I dont think there would be a large market for the Alpha being that Compaq and DEC could do nothing with the chip. IThe only company I can think that might want it would be VIA so they could make an alternative to the Intel and AMD chips like they did with the Cyrix chips.

Re:Why Intel or AMD?

[Veteran]

When Apple went with the Power PC the decision almost put them out of business. Why? Because there was no software for their new chip. They had to do with kludges like emulating the 68K in order to have anything running.

When you change chip architectures you have to run in place for years just to get back to where you were before.

As Intel is discovering with the Itanium writing state of the art compilers to support a new architecture is a very difficult job.

If processor manufacturers switched architecture every few years like you seem to be suggesting then software adds would look like this:

Gamesoft announces PONG for the Snazoid 2010

WooHoo.

Doing things like arbitrarily switching processor architecture just because you can is adolescent "I have no clue how the universe actually works - so I am randomly trying things until I find out what is going on" behavior.

Expect an Announcement on Friday

[Constellation]

I'm working on a super computing project up here in Canada, known as SHARC-Net. It is a group of Beowolf clusters (using Alpha's, with all the hardware supplied and serviced by Compaq) located at 3 different universities (as a side note 2 of the clusters run Linux and the other Tru-64). The project directors had a conference call with Compaq on Friday, for which they had to sign NDA's. When the Director for the University of Guelph came out of the conference call she was very unhappy with Compaq. She told us this:

1. Compaq will be announcing to the world what they discussed on Friday.
2. It won't effect us until 2004 (which agrees with the article).
3. Had they known about this earlier it could have effected their choice of supplier for the clusters.

This is very little to work with but it does agree with the article. Needless to say, may of Compaq's customers are very unhappy with them right now (including us as we are just now bringing these clusters online).

Motorola?

[sacremon]

Let's not forget Motorola. True, they've got the PowerPC, but it wouldn't hurt them to have another product, particularly one that is used in the server market, where the PowerPC is virtually non-existant.

Motorola is primarily an embedded processor maker, and perhaps the Alpha can see some life there as well.

Wild guess

[Ayende Rahien]

Microsoft will buy it, turn into a hardware company, and release all their software as GPL.

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Two witches watch two watches.