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Compaq Transfers Alpha to Intel
yaba was one of many who noted that Intel is apparently buying alpha from compaq. They also plan to move to their servers to Itanium. There will be at least one more generation of the Alpha chips, but you can imagine how much that'll matter. I still like alpha chips. Behold! Consolidation!Update: 06/25 02:19 PM by H :Check out my recent story about this as well.
Or how structured programming defeated the goto people. Or the 2600 defeated the Intellivision. Or VHS defeating Betamax. It's all about marketing and how many units you can sell that ultimately defines the winner. RISC is still a SPECIALIZED need. Do a few things, but do them faster. Then instructions are added over time to do [cool trendy thing] and we eventually end up with Pentiums with MMX technology. Transmeta is trying to beat both sides with programmagle CPUs, and is not defeating either side cuz they cost too much. When I can get GHz AMDs for $99, how is some high end CPU gonna compete with that, no matter how great it is?
This is a crazy article. Alpha-processor owns Alpha. Compaq only uses Alpha at this point. Alpha-Processor is owned by Compaq and Samsung. Alpha Processor is not being sold. Check out http://www.alpha-processor.com/ for more info. The Alpha will live on, just without Compaq supporting it.
I guess any filesystem where there aren't nine primitive bits that define all security is considered 'messy' by some folks.
The Unix Hymn:
'Tis a gift to be simple,
tis a gift to be free.
Tis a gift to dwell in 1973.'
Yes, of course, they should replace all their IA-32 offerings with an Alpha
Wouldn't that be a bad idea? Oh, wait a second! You're being sarcastic? Man oh man, and for a minute there I thought there was a chance that you weren't an asshole!
Hop on over to the excellent Paul DeMone articles here and check out the 3 that start with "Alpha EV8"...
I wonder how this will affect AMD's use of the Alpha's EV6 front side bus. Think: AMD can't use Intel's GTL+ bus because Intel owns the patent and they can't use the EV6 bus because... erm... Intel owns the patent.
Is this good for the Alpha? Intel is a notable company, which is a good inovater for hardware and all, but this worries me a little.
This is starting to parralell the constant buy/sell-off of the Amiga. (Yeah, I know, the hardwares themselves is apples and oranges, but...)
Fuck Ajit Pai
Whether Intel is "keeping pace with AMD" depends of course on whether you want SMP or not. As far as I know, there is currently one chipset out that supports SMP for AMD chips, and it's rather subpar - performance with two CPUs is generally about 20% to 30% faster than performance with one CPU. When you do SMP with P4s, on the other hand, performance with two CPUs is generally about 80% faster than performance with one.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I had hoped that Compaq would aggressively market Alpha with the DEC acquisition, and would offer us a choice in the IA32-IA64 migration.
I had hoped for fast and reasonably-priced Alpha systems. These never materialized. You never even gave the architecture a chance - the marketing was nonexistent.
I've had a reasonable level of respect for Compaq equipment, but now I hear that Compaq wants to reposition itself as a services company.
Shame on you, Compaq. You are the second largest computer company in the world, but it looks to the public that you are lackeys, easily threatened and controlled by Intel and Microsoft. You could have made the market a better place, but all that you've done is make everything worse.
I guess that it's all in Sun's hands now.
At the most, the IA-64 may benefit from some of the superior parts of the Alpha (and maybe standard IA-32 CPUs) like the FPU, but for the most part, the Alpha may suffer from NIH syndrome.
At least Compaq say they will port VMS to the Itanium. So while the superior CPU may die out, at least the superior OS will soldier on.
Hang on.. ported to the Itanic? That's a fate worse than death!!
Wasn't it Sun's support that asked customers to sign an NDA about a bad hardware bug?
-Paul Komarek
Was the original name. It is decended from the BBC computer, which had a 6502, but when the designers started thinking about replacing it, they didn't like the way the 680x0 and the 80x86 handled interupts, among other things, so they decided to do their own design, I think Acorn was the name of the company, or the computer. I also seem to think they were interperted, so you could swich cpu arch with no real problems.
Dear me, the things you remember from being a Newton user.
Plato seems wrong to me today
For one thing, I know of no undergraduate who writes a full C compiler as an excercise. Some toy compilers for nice subsets of C, perhaps.
And GCC is portable like hell while at the same time still optimizing the code pretty well.
For the second thing (*surprise*), GCC has been ported to the Itanium a long time ago, and has compiled, among other things, the Linux kernel for Itanium. Compaq gave me access to one of their test systems, and while I was not that impressed with the speed of the 667 MHz Itanium, everything seemed to work quite reasonably.
Stephan
Wonder if the Alpha 833 is going to be available at dollar stores because of this.
Please contact me via email. I would gladly take the machine off your hands for the price of shipping. It would have a good home, right next to the Alpha, also running OpenVMS (thank god for the hobbyist program).
P.S. I am serious.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
It translated Intel code to native Alpha code and ran it. The first translation was improved every time the Intel program was run and eventually it was running like a native Alpha application. Very nice.
Hmm... I wonder if this could be considered "Prior Art" against the Transmeta code morphing patents. It sure sounds very similar.
Result: Intel can now make ever-more pathetic CPUs on the grounds that there is NOBODY to compete with it. It has a de-facto monopoly. Everyone else is specialized into tiny niches, dead in the water, or just dead.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Very much agree with you... That's why Sun have always done well, because they have always shown utmost commitment to their arch and OS - and the *nix market appreciates that.
(i don't like solaris though)
However, both SGI and HP have committed themselves to dropping their historical home-grown CPU's and moving to IA64. So cross them off your list. So that leaves Sun and IBM. (The latter with the most god-awful OS that purports to be Unix ever. Dear God let IBM hurry up with their Linux plans.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Until they've finished pissing about with their high end products.
When you're buying large servers you want a 5-10 year upgrade lifeline in front of you.
Good news for Sun, SGI, IBM, HP.
Deleted
Hehe, farmers would be in a better position if there were 200M more mouths to feed.
$0.02
-l
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if there's no more alpha, what about OpenVMS?
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Yes, but Intel doesn't license the Socket 8/Slot 1/(What's that new socket called?). That as I understand is why AMD went with the Alpha bus in the first place. Despite the technical advantages, the marketplace had to adapt to the new bus, and manufacturers had to create boards and chipsets to use it.
If it didn't have technical advantages, it would have been a serious problem for AMD. I assume the boards are currently more expensive because of supply and demand...
If Intel locks down the new bus, they'll have pulled the rug out from AMD. I doubt the existing agreements between AMD and Alpha/Compaq include a perpetual offer to license the bus at a reasonable cost.
Will the EV6 bus be the Socket 7 all over again? Stretched to an absurdly long life until a new technology is introduced to the market? Are there any technologies left?
Does this mean that Intel has the patent on the EV6 bus AMD is using?
Compaq bought DEC for one reason and one reason only: the service organization. DEC already had a worldwide organization of service engineers on staff, and a well-oiled machine to keep it all working. In order to tackle the enterprise market, Compaq needed that, and it was easier to buy DEC than to create it themselves.
What they really didn't want was DEC's technology. Those of you who were paying attention at the time might recall that Compaq initially told their Tru64 UNIX customers that they were going to force-migrate them all to Windows NT. This sounded good for a while, until the customers shouted back, "Screw you, we're going to Sun!" That made them back off.
Perhaps Compaq has now decided that it's time to finally let go of Alpha -- a technology that they feel is "baggage" when their bread and butter is Wintel. Itanium is clearly their desired destination. The only reason they give credit to Linux is because right now it's the only operating system that actually runs on Itanium.
It's a shame, I like Compaq's hardware -- I've always found it to be very well-built (albeit proprietary in places where it shouldn't be) -- but their dedication to the Wintel monoculture is quite unattractive.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Well, VLIW/EPIC is actually very similar to RISC. The major difference is that a RISC CPU normally does branch prediction, code reordering, etc. (in real time) while VLIW/EPIC relies on a compiler to do it off-line (i.e. not it real time). Thus, theoretically, the ia64 architecture would not suffer pipeline stalls at all, but it does make compilers a whole lot more complicated. Also, relying on a compiler to do what CPU normally does in hardware, (theoretically) makes the CPU less complicated. Well, we'll see how it plays out. So far it's been a rough ride for ia64. It's what 3 years late now? And the Merced err... "Itanium" is just a testing CPU, due to be replaced by McKinly.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
the reason sun hardware is so expensive is cuz people are willing to pay that much (though, who knows why that is).
Because their support is so damn good.
Some of these have also been noted by other respondants, but let me see if I can summarize:
As for some of your other comments:
In summary, I think your conclusion that the Intel based design is the only serious contender out there is a bit overstated.
-"Zow"
I sure as hell hope so. That was the number one reason I was interested in Alpha in the first place; but it was too expensive. (Not that Itanium's cheap, of course; but Intel moves enough stock and has enough brand recognition that they should be able to fix that.)
Actually, it's OPENSTEP 5.0/Mach. But yeah, it's in the BSD lineage.
It's the price. I'm a simple home user who wants to do blazing floating point DSP for realtime synthesis. If Compaq had done better promoting and licensing, I could have bought an Alpha machine cheap.
Are you saying that I'll get better floating point performance from an IA32 than from an Alpha? News to me.
Not to mention all the people running around who get their kicks by refering to anyone using Linux as biased twerps.
Because it *isn't* Apple...it's NeXT. They're just calling themselves Apple for marketing purposes (retaining the old Mac userbase).
Right...but for my purposes (UNIX based realtime music synthesis and DSP) the Alpha running Linux would have kicked some serious ass.
The whole point of RISC is to simplify the decoder. CISC chips always "decoded" complex instructions into multiple "micro-ops". Back in the good old days it was done with microcode, nowadays they have fancier words for it.
CISC and RISC are as different now as they always were. It just turned out that decode speed isn't all that important anymore, so the advantage of RISC is pretty much history. The increased code density of CISC code is much better on the memory bandwidth and the cache.
You can also combine the disadvantages of both architectures. Say by having to have a slow complex decoder and then wasting lots of cache memory by storing the large decoded instructions.
I'm sure no chip producer which has been in the industry for a long time would do such a thing.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
On the M68000 the execution units didn't know M68000-instructions, all they handled were micro-ops.
The original 8086 was a weird mix of hard-coded instructions and microcode though.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I'm afraid it's you who's outdated. CISC
I don't remember what EPIC stands for, you can probably find it somewhere on Intel's site. Either that or wait around here for a bit, someone reading this is bound to know
Macka
Don't worry about it. There will be new generations of Alphasystems coming out until 2004, and even after that you'll still be able to buy Alpha's for a number of years. It will be several years before the drip completely runs dry and by then your employer will probably be looking to use new applications. You'll probably be working for someone else by then anyway
It's going to be several years before you can't buy an Alpha any more. That's a lifetime in this industry. There will be a few exceptions, there always is, but 99% of current Compaq Alpha customers will have moved on from current systems by then and will most likely port to IA-64 even if they are pissed with Compaq, because they will want to regain longevity, and gain flexibility over vendor and OS choice.
Long term this will work out better for everyone.
Compaq will be lucky to get it ported, much less enhanced. Remember, they will have to support Alpha through at least 2004
But they've already done it once, during the agreement with Sequent to produce an IA-64 port. I used to work for Digital/Compaq at the time, and they got quite a long way down the road to a successful port even in that short time. Don't forget, this is already a 64bit clean operating system, the port is not a difficult as you think. Also, they had not made any statements at all about throttling back on Tru64 development. That work will continue.
I think Oracle will be the final determining factor
Dead right. Go read the press release on nsye.com (lookup CPQ) you'll see that Oracle are 100% behind this move. Also, there was a cross licensing deal recently, giving Oracle unprecedented access to TruCluster DLM internals for Oracle 9i. Oracle support for Tru64 has never looked stronger.
Your choice of product names gives away just how out of touch you are with current technology offerings in the way of OpenVMS and Tru64 Unix's TruCluster Software.
Tru64 Unix (as it's now known) offers VMS style clustering on UNIX. No other vendor can currently compete in this arena. Sun's Serengeti doesn't match up, and Linux isn't there yet either. The GFS (Global Filesystem) is a significant step in the right direction, but that's only one piece in the puzzle. By the time they get parity with what TruClusters offer today, TruCluster will have moved on even further. Today, TruCluster can boast a common view of the mount table across cluster members (for any filesystem type that can sit on top of CFS). In the works, for example, are similar enhancement to the process table. I don't think that kind of functionality is even on the Linux development radar yet.
Macka
Oh well, I can still remember the excitment when Alpha was announced in around 1992. I was then 14 and was hoping by the turn of the century I will have one of these lovely chip running on my desk... It is stil my dream to own an Alpha.
I will bring some flowers to the grave, and hope someone out there come up with something better (come on AMD!)soon or we are having stuck with that Itanium Beast (having work with it last summer....)
In fact they do apprantly - see news.com analysis.
;-p
Oh well someone come up with something quick!
We shall make a GPL clone of FX!32!
GX!32?
you'll probably get a few more years out of your
new boxes. Compaq have sizable military contracts that depend on VMS. And they have been doing an awful lot of development for the platform lately.
K.
-
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Intel does x86, Itanium and ARM - and soon Alpha.
AMD, Cyrix and Transmeta do x86 compatibility and play catchup with Intel's x86 development.
Sun (Sparc), HP (HP) and IBM (PowerPC) do their own server & workstation chips as usual - on a very low level (counting CPUs here), as usual.
According to my CPU statistics Intel is the singular heavyweight with respect to CPU development here?! So Intel aquiring one of his (very) few competitors is a Bad Thing(tm) with respect to a healthy architecture diversity.
A current theory regarding Compaq's so-called marketing efforts for the Alpha platform was that it was headed up by the same people who ran Digital's crack marketing team.
Twice?! I could only dream of hearing from Compaq marketing that many times. I've been working with Alphas since, oh, around '94-'95. I have never received a call from anyone in Compaq's marketing group that wasn't a return call to one initiated by either myself or a co-worker. Salespeople who don't know how to sell. Unfortunately, that seems to have been one of the things that Compaq received when they bought Digital. Aside from some printed materials, I have found out about new offerings in Alphaservers either from the www or from local resellers. Mostly the latter, since almost immediately after Compaq's purchase of Digital, their web sites became intensely graphical and slow to the point of being unusable, links that point to nothing, pages that don't really tell you anything, etc. You become aware that there's something wrong when you cannot view pages on the official Alphaserver, and especially the Tru64, web site using a workstation running Tru64 and the browser that ships on the installation CDs. It's so nice having to use the Intel/NT box on your desk to research Alpha/Tru64 purchases. Compaq's marketing efforts are pathetic for anything that isn't Intel-based.
Even though Tru64 has been rumored to have already been ported to the Itanium processor, the comments around the office were NOT ``Well, that's a relief!'' but, rather, ``Why wouldn't we just run Linux?'' Why, indeed!
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You said:"A couple of other anti-snobby analogies:
If it weren't for companies like McDonald's, millions of people would be malnourished, having no time and too little money to feed themselves in the few minutes they have between their two jobs"
I find this especially funny, I believe that Americans are among the fatest people on average..
If you don't call this malnourished, I don't know what it is..
And yes, I believe that the "fast-food" is (partly) responsible for the overweight.
OK, I shouldn't find it funny, because being too fat can be a real problem (psychologicaly and physically), but you're comparison was so absurd that it made me smile.
The "if Motorola was the leader" worth nothing: if the history was different we DON'T know what it would have been.
The only thing sure is that we would have the 68xxx ISA which is MUCH more "beautiful" than the ugly 80x86 ISA.
IA-64 is VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word)
The same thing as Transmeta's Crusoe, just optimized for a different goal (executing as much stuff in tandem as possible versus providing a low power processer).
Yes, CISC and RISC processors seem to share more and more of the same philosophies, but they also went about their goals in different manners... This is really too bad, though, as it basically destroys one of only a few of Intel's competitors... Will it be legal fo rthem to purchase Sun and convert their entire line to Itanium as well, in order to build marketshare?
He's probably thinking of the early i810 mobo's that had a bad RAMBUS socket.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
"promoted and marketed" hahaha
I own a couple of alphas.. I'm a "registered" developer... I worked on them at a previous company.
Do you know how many times I was "marketed" to? Like... maybe twice. I worked on a total of 10 alpha systems.
Compaq has done absolutly NOTHING. NADA. Heck, their marketing sites "alphapowered" was always broken. The only freaking thing they ever got right was the processor itself. You couldn't even buy an alpha online from their site.
Oh well, maybe they'll be a great discount on hardware.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Alpha has this same instruction set (Since the EV4/5 even). It does repetitive loops over numerous registers to achieve massive multiplication/division sets (useful for MPEG encoding)
It's called Alpha MVI.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
You mean like Cygnus Solutions? They're a bunch loosers anyway.
Volunteers makes it sound degrading, too. I guess the United Way are all a bunch of loosers. So's the Red Cross and Catholic Charities. All Loosers
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
ultrasparc III is a dud. it's performance is lacking, to say the least.
You're probably running standard programs that are compiled for SPARC32 on there... i.e. no US3 optimizations, let along even Ultra 1. The sad thing is, most stuff out there for Solaris is like this. I think the only program I use regularly that's Ultra compiled is Real Player.
Personally, I think the thing that has killed Sun over the last year or two is the fact that they focused so hard on the US3 that they didn't bother to work on putting out faster US2 chips. While the US3 chips are fast, and are an improvement, Sun has appeared stagnant until now because after the 450MHz US2s came out, they didn't continue to make faster ones. Whereas Intel and AMD have been cranking out faster and faster chips. We all know that raw MHz doesn't really mean jack when comparing completely different architechtures, but too many people do.
We've found that most of the vendors we work wit have already moved over to x86 with Linux now and are beginning to leave their Sun ports on the back burner.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
NT is at least as poor a bet as VMS. You will have no problem supporting your current Alpha-based VMS systems for many years to come, and since Microsoft is officially on a 2-4 year upgade cycle (and changing their license terms to force you into the upgrades, see many previous /. articles) it won't cost you any more than the NT treadmill.
I know of at least two VAX/VMS systems still in heavy daily use running VMS 5 (yes, they both survived Y2K without patches or problems despite the doomsayers). How many NT 3.51 systems (which is not really a fair comparison anyway since VMS 6 predates NT 3.51) are still in use? How many of them go five years without rebooting?
Start converting to linux now; take your time, and all things will converge nicely for you in five years or less. Don't bother with NT, it's just another proprietary rat-hole.
--Charlie
PS:
I admin VMS, linux, and NT, incidentally (among others) for a living.
--CTB
Most commercial unix variants can use ACLs if you want them. Linux has ACL patches.
Linux evolves over time in response to the needs of its users. WNT evolves over time in response to what Microsoft tells WNT users they want...
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Alpha has a very good software x86 emulation - I'd reckon that Intel wants the rights to that - not to mention possible patents controlling the Alpha system bus that the AMD Athlon uses...
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Microsoft competes well in the desktop market, but they aren't a serious contender in the high-end server market. Do they even have a 32-bit operating system?
Intel competes well in the desktop market, but they aren't a serious contender in the high-end server market. Do they even have a 32-bit processor?
The IBM PC architecture competes well in the desktop market....
These are all statements that could have been made in the past (and probably were). They've all been superseded. I would suggest that success in the desktop market permits economies of scale that can be used to overtake the server market. On a side note, I would suggest that success in the desktop market hinges on selling to business customers. Thus Dell is eating both Compaq's and Gateway's lunches.
...is that they can never seem to figure out what to focus on. They now have their fingers in:
1. Wintel pc/server/laptop production and sales, 2. Mainframe/HA class machines through the Stratus and DEC acquisitions
3. IT Services through the DEC acquisition,
4. Internet appliances/portable clients (IPaq)
5. Consumer pc's and laptops
Given their history of getting their lunch eaten by more focused competitors over the past few years (Dell, IBM, Sun, Gateway, etc.), is it any wonder that Compaq management still doesn't know what/how to run their business?
Alpha does not compete with AMD. AMD is a low-end chip that mostly runs on desktop and only recetly there is a support for a dual-way SMP. Alpha processors historically had a super fast FP and well as integer performance. Coupled with large caches, they were used in unix servers and workstations for more than a decade.
I think Sun and IBM are actually the ones that kicked serious ass recently, capturing most of the US unix server market, and Compaq figured it can't compete with Alpha against them. They had a good chip but compaq f*cked it up.
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/list_news.php?c ategory=CPU#N50000287
Oh, BTW, be sure to check Itanium's SPECint2k nubmers, calling them "bad" would be a nice way to put it.
It's pretty obvious that the moderation system can't support any rational discussion of any technical issue. The posts containing the most WRONG information get modded up the most. There's no way to refute the unending stream of poseurs who think they know what they are talking about. Plus, the system prevents a knowledgeable person from both moderating comments intelligently AND sharing his information with the group - brilliant. Plus, once a thread gets past 100 posts or so, new comments get lost in the mess and rarely get moderated, so the FUD stays moderated up while the posts with the TRUE FACTS stay way down at 1 or 2.
If I remember correctly, when the DEC/Intel fiasco occurred, the only way that the US govt allowed Intel to purchase parts of DEC was to guarantee that there would be a second source for manufacturing of the Alpha for 10 years. That meant that Intel's fabs (previously DECs) had to continue to produce the chip, and allow folks like Samsung to also build it. Wonder if the new agreement will alter that - and if so, will the US govt step in?
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
Before fast food those of us who work 3 jobs ate something called a "sack lunch". You are bright enough to recognize that the letters on the keyboard correlate to letters on the screen but you are still dumb enough to make such a comment? Troll.
Is it *BAD* that Intel will own (and destroy) Alpha? YES.
Alpha was constructed by engineers for customers who prioritize quality over cost. Alpha owners have passion for quality. They are themselves engineers and scientists who want a Rolls Royce -class computing machine.
Intel does not make top-notch hardware. Intel makes ugly, nasty, practical devices (sometimes even "practical" is a stretch). Go check your hotmail with a Pentium III just as you would make your daily commute in a Honda Accord. No one is going to care.
Push forward the limits fluid-dynamics simulation with an Alpha cluster as you would joy-ride the Autobahn in an Accura NSX.
Do you see the point yet? There's nothing wrong with Intel making a gazillion dollars selling the IT equivalent of a Chevy truck to most of the world. What is wrong is that we (admittedly very small few) who want grace, beauty and power in our number-crunching machinery have lost one of the gems that defined the "genere".
Not everyone can afford an Alpha or a Ferrari. That doesn't mean that we should allow them to be quashed by Intel.
Of course we're snobby. We are the hackers and the geeks. You are the ignorant (and appearantly the lazy). Go re-certify your MCSE and we aren't going to pay attention to your whoring much less put you down for it. But break our toys and we're going to give you two black eyes.
What does this mean for API Networks then? http://www.alpha-processor.com
On their website it says that "API NetWorks, Inc. (formerly Alpha Processor, Inc.) was founded in June of 1998 and is a privately held company based in Concord, Massachusetts. Funded by Samsung Electronics Co., LTD. and Compaq Computer Corp."
"API NetWorks is a co-developer (with AMD) of the next generation high-speed I/O HyperTransportTM (formerly known as LDT) technology..."
Plus, it also says that they provide Alpha based solutions and also do development work on the Alpha.
Jody
We're now in the process of decommissioning our VAX 4000/200 running VMS 5.5-2. Up until March, it was fairly heavily used. Moved everything to Sybase on Linux 2.4.2.
Any thoughts on what to do with a 4000/200 with several (somewhat flaky) RA81/RA82 drives?
The newer Dell servers have console redirection built-in.
DRAC is a stinking pile of dog crap.
Next SPARC will die. It has to because the economics for it just are not there. Sun is creeping further and further behind in the bang/$ curve and they simply don't have the money required to go to the next level.
The raw facts are it costs nearly unbelievable amounts of money to roll out a CPU in today's market. (Xylinx gets bigger devices and things might change, BTW.) Compaq nor Sun have the pockets needed to roll out the basic technology that runs the industry.
Technological wizardary not withstanding, Alpha and Sparc are doomed.
-- Multics
P.S. CISC, RISC, WISK, who cares? Economics and business relationships control what is adopted and by who. I wish it were not so, but wishing doens't make it so. It is silly even to discuss it, since these two CPUs are dead from purely economic reasons.
Back before Compaq purchased DEC, Intel and DEC were in a lawsuit over Intel keeping a bunch of Alpha technical specs (including details about there technology to run 32-bit code) to help Intel (and HP) with their IA-64 work. Intel responded to DEC's lawsuit by threatening to withhold Intel processors from DEC and issuing a counter lawsuit. This put DEC up the creek without a paddle since they made the bulk of their money from Intel based systems. DEC responded by crying, "monopolist!" If I remember correctly, at one point it looked like the government was really going to get involved. It only got settled when Compaq swallowed DEC up. The lawsuits were dropped or settled out of court and the government's investigation of Intel quietly died. I don't even know if Intel even got a slap on the wrist.
So Compaq purchased DEC, sold StrongArm to Intel, sold AltaVist to CMGI, and is discontinuing Alpha and selling some of its IP to Intel. Why did they buy DEC again? It seems a lot of effort and money for DEC's services division.
-- soldack
Current Pentium 3/4 CPUs are mostly RISC in the core, with a CISC emulation layer overhead.
I'd assume that most of the IA-64 is RISC, again with a CISC emulation layer overhead.
The CISC/RISC war was never won or lost, they merged.
At the most, the IA-64 may benefit from some of the superior parts of the Alpha (and maybe standard IA-32 CPUs) like the FPU, but for the most part, the Alpha may suffer from NIH syndrome.
Sad, since it's superior to just about ALL other CPUs out there.
Can you explain how exactly SIMD instruction set enhancements are "superinstructions"?? Virtually every SIMD extension from Intel(MMX/SSE, etc/), AMD(3DNow!), Sun(VIS) or Motorola(AltiVec) involve significant extensions to the hardware and/or additional resources at the microarchitecture level. SIMD instructions are handled with hardware that are specifically designed or modified to handle these instructions, period-MMX instroduced new registers and FU's to execute SIMD instructions in about the same number of clock cycles; and other SIMD enhancements followed suit.
If you're using "Superinstructions" to refer to hyped-up "pseudo-instructions" that do little more than call up a series of microcode routines; your post is misleading. SIMD instruction sets do actually enhance performance in a lot of applications (there is a good paper on this written by a group of academics using SUN VIS as a test case-check out www.citeseer.com to find this.), unfortunately compiler technology could not catch up, leaving it to the programmers to explicitly code against a given SIMD extension technology.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
Actually, IA-64 is neither. It is based on something called VLIW (very long instruction word) which packs multiple, simple, independant instructions into one big instruction. Thus instruction can have its parts executed in parallel, which means that the CPU doesn't have to do instruction reordering.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"Modern" CISC is essentially RISC. If you take a look at the architectures of ALL modern x86 CPUs, they are internally RISC, but decode x86 instructions. On Intel, these x86 instructions decode onto multiple "micro-ops" and on the P4, it is these micro-ops that are stored in L1 instruction cache. On the AMD K7, these instructions are called ROPs (RISC-like operations). On both these CPUs, the simple x86 instructions are translated directly into ROPs or micro-ops, while the more complicated ones are translated into multiple ROPs or micro-ops. On both the CPUs, the execution units only execute the micro-ops, not the x86 instructions themselves.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Not really. Before the P6, all x86 chips had execution units that worked directly with x86 instructions. Now, the instruction units on the P4 don't even know what an x86 instruction is, all they handle are P4 micro-ops.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Such communal reinforcement of the underdog is what makes a free-enterprise democracy stand out from the crowd. The US market (where these companies are based, located, run from, and count their revenue quarterly) is a self-proclaimed free enterprise, but is so politely tuned, chopped into portions, and regulated with as many bad as there are good laws that any G.E.D. graduate can see the US market is as much socialist as it is democratic.
Supporting an underdog is the necessary social response in order to maintain an open, competitive market. There is no doubt that Intel has a very heavy hand in the commodity CPU industry, and the acquisition of Alpha technology by one of Intel's competitors would help level the playing field. This sort of competition would benefit the customers, and the market, much more than Intel gobbling this up just to ensure that no one else can give them a scare in their niche market.
Remember that when DEC sold off their assets, they sold a LOT of microprocessor technology to Intel, including the StrongARM, their chipsets, their embedded controllers, and their NICs. They certainly had enough of a relationship with Intel that they could have worked a deal on the Alpha technology if they wanted to. Instead, DEC sold the Alpha processor to Compaq, under the hope that they would make it grow and keep the very high-quality processor in the market.
It certainly looks like Compaq has been slowly killing the Alpha by tort, and has started parceling off bits and pieces of the technology. First, the EV6 bus got licensed to AMD for the Athlon. Then it got licensed out to all those motherboard makers. Now they're selling off some architectural information and compilers for the Alpha to Intel. I guess the one glimmer of hope for all of us who tend to like the underdog is that Compaq has disposed of assets both to AMD and Intel, holding some sort of neutral position. That does leave some hope of avoiding a more-or-less Intel-only future.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Alpha has always had such a clock-rate advantage over comparable CISC chips, but never were able to grab the market share.
With all the advanced in chip technology, has CISC finally won the battle over RISC?
Or are the terms CISC/RISC just plain outdated, given the number of RISC behaviors in newer Intel CISC chips?
I imagine that Intel will have to maintain the current contracts, but when it comes up for renewal, AMD might have a problem.
My XL 300 has been happily running Slackware 7.x for over 4 months and also at Kernel 2.4.3. This is a slow machine, but, a great tool for porting 64-bit applications, which is why I picked it up. The underlying hardware is very solid and stable, and, network speed through the bus blazes data at 8 MBytes/sec (that's bytes) through a cheap Lite-On 82c168 PNIC. As a file server my dual Celeron 400 doesn't even come close.
It's a shame to see Intel get the Alpha, but, for those of us out here seeking to continue to use these machines for what they're good at, it's very Linux-friendly.
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
what about the fact that ia-64 SUCKS? compaq publishes papers about how superior alpha is, then turns right around and standardizes on ia-64! i thought it was sad when compaq bought dec and when sgi dropped mips, but this is by far the worst. intel has now bought out the superior competetion and will force another of their idiotic architectures on the world. once again, marketing and momentum win over superior design and preformance.
i think it'll be interesting to see if customers attempt to sue compaq, since they've been claiming a 20-25 year life span for alpha.
ultrasparc III is a dud. it's performance is lacking, to say the least. i have never heard of any drive containing sun firmware and i don't know why one would. just cuz it's branded as a sun drive (like quantums have been branded as apple and dec drives), doesn't mean sun wrote it's firmware. the reason sun hardware is so expensive is cuz people are willing to pay that much (though, who knows why that is).
Damn. Well... there are still options but I've always been kind of partial to the Alpha. Oh well.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you didn't eat at McDonald's, you probably wouldn't need two jobs. Eating something from the grocery store is much cheaper.
What I'm more curious about is how is this going to affect AMD! Amd either licensed or bought the rights for alphas bus architecture and uses it in all of it's new processors. What if Intel suddenly decided not to renew their license, etc..
This sucks ass. I have really wanted to get a nice Alpha system, but haven't had the money yet. Now it looks like a cheap system will never materialize...
What's more, I've been working on an Alpha emulator recently, and if the architecture is going to go down the drain, then perhaps the only good implementations left will be emulations....
Say, doesn't Cray use Alphas in its T3E machines or something? I would think that that is a pretty big market...
-----
Compaq is, according to the article, also commiting to the release of one more generation of Alpha processors. But, I think you can assume that will be the last. They will be porting their OS technology to Itanium.
I think you are basically right. As far as I can tell from the press releases, this is what's happening: (1) Compaq is cancelling development on EV8 and successors, (2) Compaq will complete EV7, (3) Intel will get all Alpha technology (CAD tools, chip designs, etc.), (4) Intel will offer Alpha engineers positions presumable on IA-64 development, (5) Compaq will completely migrate away from Alpha to Itanium.
The last one gives it away: if Compaq is not a customer of Alpha, who is? So, yes, Alpha is officially dead (with EV7). Intel's interest in Alpha is not in Alpha itself, but in the design technology.
Glad to hear you didn't jump to Intel. :-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Alpha engineers have been jumping ship to AMD, and Intel knows how valuable engineers are (remember, they poached Motorola engineers) to the competition.
So who is the competition? Intel already took much of Motorola's brain trust, and Motorola keeps screwing up. IBM continues to do well with PowerPC, but that's a niche market and Intel probably figures they'll take down IBM's PowerPC later.
No, the competition here is certainly AMD. With AMD's stated goal of moving into the enterprise market starting to bear fruit, Intel has got to be a bit scared. As they say, "only the paranoid survive."
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Just like the Borgias.
Got Rhinos?
We see that in the operating system field: IBM, the old monopolist, is keeping some pressure on Microsoft, the once-upon-a-time underdog, by funding development in and lending respectability to Linux.
I'll say again what I said in my orignal post: Worrying about monopoly and the evils thereof isn't a once-and-for-all sort of thing, and we can't divide the world into the evil and the good. Intel and MS are antitrust threats because they are NOT the underdogs, and thus can smother competition with FUD and dollars. AMD and Sun can't, yet, so we don't worry about them. Yet. [Emphasis added to the "yet"s.]
See what I've been reading.
There is a reason for the double standard: AMD really _is_ different than Intel. It isn't because they're nice guys, it's because they are the underdog. Their continued success, and their very existence, is in doubt from year to year. If AMD were to buy the Alpha, that would give them some additional technology resources and another product line which is solidly positioned at the high end of the pc market where they are weakest. AMD+Alpha would be a better competitor to Intel, and we would all benefit as Intel scrambled to raise quality and production and lower costs.
Intel is already stiff, possibly insurmountable, competition to AMD. Intel+Alpha lets Intel assimilate any valuable elements of the Alpha which can overcome the NIH syndrome, and strengthens their lead in the high end, high margin pc market where AMD really needs to catch up.
Intel+Alpha = less competition in the future, AMD+Alpha = more competition in the future. This isn't because of any moral superiority of AMD, but because AMD isn't yet big enough to screw us as effectively as Intel. If AMD "wins the war" and displaces Intel, they will of course try to do the same sort of damage that Microsoft did when they "won the war" against IBM. But remember, if you're old enough, that IBM was an evil empire too, before MS cut them down to size.
Worrying about monopoly and the evils thereof isn't a once-and-for-all sort of thing, and we can't divide the world into the evil and the good. Intel and MS are antitrust threats because they are NOT the underdogs, and thus can smother competition with FUD and dollars. AMD and Sun can't, yet, so we don't worry about them. Yet.
See what I've been reading.
If I remember right, the Athlon licenses the EV6 System Bus from Digital/Compaq. Anybody care to comment on what this might mean. Will this mean that Intel will be able to directly manipulate the price of AMD's processors? Could someone out there who knows what they are talking about maybe comment on this. I hate to speculate.
I wonder if this move on intels part is more designed to deny AMD anymore alpha technology (which they have included in the athlon processors, particularly cache structure) rather than an attemp to gain new technology for themselves.
IMHO, it's not a theoretical limit. There are plenty of database servers today that would cheerfully use 8 gigs. Likewise for scientific and engineering programs. Late 2003 will see this market really open up, and whoever can ship >32-bit boxen will be able to collect $100s per system in pure profit. Whoever doesn't pursue 64-bit will see themselves locked out of a lucrative market. The big chip makers see this brick wall, and that's why everybody is developing 64-bit CPUs.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
He didn't say that they make the best FPU core in the world. Can I run down to Future Shop and snag an Alpha station, a copy of Windows and Office so I can read word docs? No? Doesn't sound like so good a chip to me. Sure, it can do everything faster, cheaper, and while playing a symphonic orchestra, but if I can't get my hands on it, and use it for whatever I use computers for on a daily basis, it sure as hell doesn't qualify as 'the best.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This is spectacular. We just completed a year-long project migrating 15 years of in house applications to OpenVMS Alpha.
The only reason we actually went ahead is the BINARY COMPATIBILITY! IA-64 won't be compatible! So in a few years when our computing demands once again exceed our systems we'll have to reproduce the entire migration.
Are there any details as to who will be continuing to support the current Alpha line, retired VAX line, and OpenVMS?
I have to admit Compaq has not been the greatest benefactor to DEC's legacy, however, for the users of digital's software and hardware massive uncertainty again surrounds us.
I should have just given in when the administrators wanted NT.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
PNG defeated GIF because it performed better at GIF's purpose: losslessly compressing still images with large solid colors or repetitive fill patterns. PNG packs tighter, supports alpha transparency and true color, and doesn't have a big ugly patent hanging over its head. JPEG complements PNG and GIF by providing lossy compression of images with smoothly varying tones (such as photos). GIF is losing its status as the Web animation format to Flash and MNG+SVG+SMIL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I wonder if this could be considered "Prior Art" against the Transmeta code morphing patents.
Dynamic recompilation has been used for a long time (see also Connectix Virtual PC, Speed Doubler, and Virtual Game Station). Transmeta's claimed innovation (I consider myself quite skilled for an IANAL at figuring out what patents say) is branch prediction using commit/rollback semantics (remember your SQL?) for the CPU registers. The prior art is something similar that was implemented in the Zilog Z80 processor (not the game boy's Sharp z80clone).
Will I retire or break 10K?
It happened before here in the Silicon Valley.
ASK was sold to CA and the 250 Ingres engineers found out that CA wouldn't maintain the domestic partners benefits, so they walked to Oracle, Informix and Sybase.
DEC's ULTRIX workstation development group was based Palo Alto and they were told that the group was being moved to Nashua. They all got up, packed their offices, and left. Of the 50+ engineers, 1 relocated to NH.
----
Well, IA-64 is already incompatible, so they obviously think it's a a great idea. AMD is the one with the backwards compatible 64-bit x86.
Then how do you explain the results here?
And just when you thought Alphas we're the best 64bits platform to go to if you we're anti-intel and looking for real performance....
First, Digital selling it to compaq,
then compaq who NEVER promoted alphas and canned windows 2000 pro developpement with microsoft at around build 2128 if I remember correctly, and then transfering it to intel??? Nice way to slowly die.
I remember how much the compaq representative didn't want to compare the Alpha workstations to the intel processors when he came to do a demo, he claimed it was the fastest processor, this and that, all good, but NEVER DARED to compare it to an intel for the 3d rendering performance.
They held a big bomb but never used it... they could have been one major competitor in the 64 bits arena and high-performance workstation, but they never DARED to touch intel's domination since they were selling intel boxes too. I can't beleive they've pulled a "gateway" (i.e. gateway with amiga) on the Alpha... this is so frustrating...
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I'd seriously think about quitting and moving to AMD. Both for ethical reasons and personnal reasons. Unless there's a closed contract like "work for us for 3 years full", I don't see why anyone would work there anymore (unless he's got the big $$ and a high level, and even then...)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I think the main difference between Motorola and IBM PowerPCs is certain extensions. Motorola G4 processors have the AltiVec extensions, while the IBM chips do not. Also I know IBM adds hooks to the chips used in the AS/400, erm, iSeries to support OS/400. I would think that they do something similar for the pSeries (RS/6000) and the zSeries (390) mainframes. I'm sure there's more cache in their server processors as well.
Somebody please, tell this machine I'm not a machine.
Here's an article at ZDnet about it. At least they're bound to be a little more impartial in the article than a press release from Intel.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5093 197,00.html
--------------------------------------
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
>>>You sound like one of these idiotic Intel employees I have to work with every day.
If Intel employees are your coworkers (or cow-orkers) aren't you saying you work for Intel?
I've been wondering about this. AFAIK the only difference between a Sun compatible SCSI card and an off-the-shelf SCSI card is the latter lack the Forth firmware with which to boot the card.
AMD Sledgehammer isn't quite finished, but there is already software ready for it...
And I like my mashed potatoes with garlic, damnit.
--
"That's one small step for man..."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Go to Toms Hardware and look at the chip benchmarks.
They never benchmark the AMD with the same speed intel. For example, the AMD 1.2GHz is usually benchmarked against the 1.6GHz Intel. Just because the chip is marketted at a speed doesn't mean its equivalent to its competitors speed.
--
"That's one small step for man..."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Is this a desperate attempt to stay in competition with AMD? To speak bluntly, Intel hasn't released a stable chip since the P3. They keep releasing really fast chips just to keep the pace with AMD. But with the recalls of the P4, I think the chip buying community is ready to put their faith in AMD.
I think the brightest move for Intel would be to dump the P4, and just update the technologies on the alpha... The alpha isn't anywhere near the end of its cycle...
--
"That's one small step for man..."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Hmm. How about MOS 6502s? I knew there was a reason I have my C64 in my attic.....
As an aside, when DEC was bought by Compaq Intel bought DEC's StrongARM and new england foundry. Most of the employees left. From what I hear a goodly chunk of the StrongARM folks joined Cadence and other design firms. I don't know about the rest.
I think there's historical evidence that the only thing Intel is buying here is patents.
Becuz Apples are reliable enough to serve as webservers in space!
here's the link
http://webevents.broadcast.com/compaq/PressAnnounc ement
For those of us who are into hearing sales geeks talk.
[Note the space typo in the link is a slash problem/bug. I can see it spelled correctly in the comment box.]
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
In particular this quote
"As an independent Alpha architecture licensee, Alpha Processor, Inc. engineers microprocessors, Alpha platforms and leading-edge system logic."
So it seems like API only license the Alpha technology, they don't own it.
I tried to find a more up-to date reference or one from the API site but I couldn't. However I don't think Compaq would be anouncing a transfer of technology they don't own - do you?Slashdot's reputation!? Slashdot's rep is that of a bunch of college students commenting outside their experience and expertise, and it's not very far wrong. It's fun and a good read and I've learned some things around here, but it's a lot like hanging out in the Quad at Enormous State University and eavesdropping on 15 different conversations. If we had a keg we'd call it a party.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
One must keep in mind, however, that massive amounts of cash come from people who just want a home PC and are happy with their Celeron processor, and not uber-geeks who delve into electron-by-alectron analysis of the chip circuitry. Will this help Intel with their chip development? Certainly. Will it increase their market share? In the short term, it is doubtful. In the long term, it's anyone's guess. I don't think anyone that has made long-term estimates on the computer industry has managed to come out of it NOT looking like an ass.
Root DOWN
from the article:
"The bottom line is: we are creating great customer value,"I hate it when they say that. It'll probably mean we can all dive into our pockets again.
I've never liked the Alphas due to the poor design. They only managed to get performance by increasing the MHz on the thing. I saw some performance numbers early on, with an Alpha 275MHz and an PowerPC 601 100MHz. PowerPC relative performance: 100 Alpha relative performance: 175 So, for 175% higher MHz, it only performed 75% faster. This was with a small CPU benchmark, entirely contained in the L1 cache. To me, that's poor design.
//TheToon
notable for stealing many of DEC's technologies and getting busted.
innovator [By 1995 Palmer (Former CEO of Digital Equipment Corp) was noticing reviews of Intel's new Pentium Pro line that found it strikingly--even suspiciously--improved over its Pentium forebears. Intel itself provided the most damning hints that it had leaned on its competitors for the upgrade. "There's nothing left to copy," said chief operating officer Craig Barrett in an incendiary Wall Street Journal article in August 1996. "We're a big banana now," noted CEO Andrew Grove. "We can't rely on others to do our research and development for us."]
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
[...]Customers get increased performance, price/performance and application support.[...]
Increased price/performance???
Wow! Intel is really honest to their customers. They tell them, that they will have to pay more for less performance.
That's because Intel is still trying to figure out how to make a 64-bit processor. :)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
AMD may be the underdog now, but will they keep that status? Remember how Compaq (with Phoenix) were the first to challenge IBM's ownership of the PC, by producing their famous "clean-room" BIOS? Yesterday's underdog is tomorrow's monopoly, so I'd be careful about giving AMD special treatment..!
(this is not a
Several years ago DEC sued Intel becasue they infringed on close to 100 patents on Alpha technology. Before DEC manufactured the Alpha they submitted all the specs to Intel for possible manufacturing. DEC desided to build a fab plant and do it themselves. This fab plant was loosing DEC millions and millions. When DEC discovered all the patent infrigements they came up with an out of court settlement of selling the fab plant to Intel for 2 Billion along with the rights for Intel to use any of the Alpha technology they wanted to. This was around 3 or 4 years ago.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
I disagree with this post (and completely agree with the responses from nels_tomlinson and nobody.de), but it still shouldn't be modded down as a troll. It's this person's opinion, honestly stated. Somebody mod this back up so it rejoins the conversation.
"Yes, Intel sells cheap, under-wrought chips (it isn't for lack of trying). But if it weren't for those, you wouldn't have a computer. "
By that logic, we wouldn't be using computers today without MS either. Which is pure and unadulterated BS. Making the "cheapest and the mostest" doesn't do anything but lead people to accept lower and lower quality in the name of convenience and profits for the seller. Intel is just lucky that it's much more difficult to pull off an open-source processor than OS. And to take your McD's analogy one step further, while McNuggets may be fine for the kids occasionally, would you serve it at a board meeting? Didn't think so. So why settle for less in your server room? Or even at home. God knows I'd be ready to scream after a couple days of nothing but McD's.
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
The problem with rage is that it makes it hard to focus and say what you're really feeling.
Intel has made a fortune selling garbage. The x86 architecture is just that - garbage. CISC is dead, and has been for a long time. They couldn't make a decent SMP setup until they stole technology from a International Meta Systems (P6). The flaw in CISC is the inclusion of superinstructions - why add hardware to perform a partial arctangent when memory is cheap? Wait! I have an idea...let's add 57 new ones and call them MMX. Wait! How about 72 news ones called KNI/Streaming SIMD.
Could I do it better? No. But Alpha was truely, without a question in my mind, the finestest CPU ever engineered. It's a pleasure to work on, it's fast, it scales well, and it does out of order execution, which gives it a leg up on the Ultra Sparc.
This has caused a pretty big uproar on comp.os.vms as well. As you may or may not know, OpenVMS, which at one time was THE operating system to run (if you weren't blue) only runs on the VAX and Alpha. Well, Compaq quit making the VAX in September 2000, so this is it. While Compaq claims OpenVMS will be ported to IA-64, it's hardly comparable. There are VAXen in production that haven't been rebooted in a decade. Software in place that hasn't changed in years...and this is how it's going to end? Compaq gives away Alpha technology so they can focus on the iPaq?
These are the issues raised in comp.os.vms:
Will *every* Compaq product which is sold for Alpha VMS today ( or last week ) be ported to IA64? Will they all be available by January 2004? Do they have commitments from Oracle to meet that schedule ( Oracle appear to be "excited" about Tru64 on IA64 but didn't mention if they cared VMS would be available there )? Will all existing LP licenses be transferrable to IA64 at no cost ( to systems of comparable size)? [anyone who went through a VAX to Alpha transition will understand this question]
Will Compaq provide assistance to 3rd party vendors to move their products to IA64? Will IA64 ports be a straight "recompile and link" or will some programs require substantial changes ( eg device drivers and privileged code )?
My point was that it seems to get limited respect within Compaq. I've been told ( sorry I can't remember the source ) that it was a last minute decision to port it to Alpha and that it wasn't in the original game plan. My concern is the same thing could happen in the Alpha-IA64 transition.
FMS is another product I worry about. I understand it also wasn't going to be ported, until they realized that All-in-1 needed it. FMS was not recoded for Alpha it was just VESTed. Will it be possible to re-VEST it to run on IA64? Will it be done?
And the quote that sums the whole thing up, from Bill Gunshannon:
Of course, this means congratulations are in order for it's grandfather. The PDP-11 architecture has now not only outlasted the VAX, but also the Alpha.
foo?
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
There's a good chance that the Alpha boys won't have the choice to leave Intel and join AMD. Many contracts have clauses where employees are not allowed to join "the competition" within X-months. I remember a certain department of a certain telco company which was spun off without the employees input. Basically anyone under that department was immediately barred from leaving the new spin-off and joining a competing company.
Depending on the partnership/selloff going on here, we might lose the Alpha guys to Intel.
-- Unrelated, Intel seems to have too much overhead to continue developing Alpha if they do gain control of it.
Just another nail in the coffin
Compaqs liquidation of Alpha means the end of the end for VMS; Digital Unix as well. The shrinking field of CPU competitors means a shrinking field of OS competitors as well. How much will Compaq invest in OS or software development for a processor that Intel is sure to scrap?
Bottom line: Anyone running a Compaq/DEC operating system had better download the appropriate GNU compilers and start converting to Linux. For DEC refugees, Linux is now "the only game in town."
I could be wrong. There might be a ton of Oracle support for Tru64, but as an Oracle customer, I sure don't see it. At my current job, we just started to create an Oracle environment. I asked the pre-sales tech. support for their recommendation on platform, since we had to buy all the hardware anyway (and I was already unhappy with Windows NT/2000). They pushed Solaris and Windows 2000 (in that order). Tru64 was never mentioned. Not wanting to re-experience the orphan support level as in their VMS offering, I was only too happy to pick Solaris. If I told them I already had a Tru64 server and was considering buying their database for it, I'm sure they would have told me how good their Tru64 product support is (and maybe it really is).
Alpha may be a better chip than Itanium or SPARC II. Tru64 may be a better OS than Solaris or Linux. But at the end of the day, Oracle is making the sale for SPARC II/Solaris. Press release or no press release, it remains to be seen if Oracle intends to support Tru64 the same way they support Solaris.
So for this to be something other than a coincidence seems rather unlikely.
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
suwain_2
From dictionary.com:
vagary n : a sudden desire; "he bought it on impulse" [syn: caprice, impulse, whim]
Compaq killed the Alpha, Sun has just released UltraSparcIII 900Mhz, so their cpus are far from dead. The problem is those babys are damn expensive, partly because of low volume sales, partly because of Sun's margin on hardware. I've always wondered why Sun's parts are so expensive, hard disks and memory specially. Sure hard disks contain custom firmware, but other stuff like scsi controllers are ridiculous expensive.
Intel only owned the parts of Alpha that it already owned because Intel was already using Alpha technology in its chips efore it owned any of it.
Remember when Intel and DEC settled DEC's infringement suit when Intel bought the Alpha lines? How is that a settlement? Clearly DEC wasn't terribly interested in maintaining the technological independence of the Alpha design.
That same agreement multi-sourced Alpha at Samsung, AMD, and IBM. So there was and is no danger of Intel's monopolizing Alpha.
Compaq then bought all of DEC, and ended up owning whatever was left over.
(Naturally, that sounds like an inefficiency. Compaq can't handle inefficiency. Intel is organized to mediate inefficiency and even find ways to profit from it. They build a fab for one chip partly on the premise that once that chip is done in the market they can use the fab line for less-mainstream products; they've done this for 30 years; some lines are designed knowing that their primary product--this year's desktop chip, for example--will never be enough to pay the mortgage; it's a gutsy and thoroughly pro move).
--Blair
I know this is redundant, but: NOOOOOOO this is absolutely bad. I don't like it
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
Alpha Processor Inc. is at http://www.alpha-processor.com/, not www.api.com My bad.
- Turq - "That's TRON, he fights for the users."
Alpha isn't going to die so easily. Keep in mind that Compaq does -not- own all of the Alpha technology. Alpha Processor Inc (www.api.com) holds quite a bit of the liscensing; and while Compaq is involved in API, so are big names like Samsung. Do you thing Samsung and other such partners are going to lose the Alpha CPU just so Compaq and Intel can play kissy-face?
- Turq - "That's TRON, he fights for the users."
AMD wouldn't scrap Alpha. The would use it.
:(
Intel WILL scrap it.
Alpha ist dead meat, ups, silicon now...
PS: Anybody know where to get some, now cheap, alphas befor they fade to non-existence?
Based on the above, it looks like they are providing some resources and tools, and licensing the current technology. What this means (IMHO) is that they are partnering with Intel to work towards next-generation processors (Itanium and beyond), and are helping provide Intel with additional resources to improve their 64-bit line. Compaq is, according to the article, also commiting to the release of one more generation of Alpha processors. But, I think you can assume that will be the last. They will be porting their OS technology to Itanium. The plus side to this is that you may see some of the more interesting bits of Alpha technology show up down the line in some of the Intel processors.
I wonder how all of this will impact AMD....
GreyPoopon
--
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
and they use terms like 'Micro$oft', and never listen to the other side of the argument.
The more of this biassed, pathetic rubbish is posted on slashdot, the more slashdot's reputation is going to slip.
Supporting an underdog is the necessary social response in order to maintain an open, competitive market.
Surely that means that anyone can enter a market, make the least amount of effort in producing a poor product, and because they're the underdog, people like you would support them? Are you mad? Do you drive a car made in Slovakia? You should do, as they're the underdogs when compared to Ford et al. Your reasoning is as flawed as communism - If we all get the same benefits, why work harder?. Intel are top of their market for a reason - they make the best chips in the world. They make the best chipsets in the world. Their R&D has driven PCs since day one. We owe them a lot. They saw a position to be able to steer a major competitor's product roadmap, and they've taken it.
Intel is a company, not a moral crusader. I bet you wouldn't be happy until Intel bought Alpha as a present for AMD, and wrapped a big ol' bow round it.
Slashdot isn't news for nerds, it's heavily-censored pro-linux, anti-microsoft opinions for nerds.
If you don't like it here, please leave. Otherwise, try to post something remotely intelligent.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Of course you can opt out of their support program: Buy a box from someone else.
Some people sell hardware, others sell service/experience/deisgn/whatever (with the harware thrown in). If you want just the hardware, buy it elsewhere or build it yourself. But don't whine when a company that sells more than just atoms won't change their business plan to cater to your every desire. Take your dollars elsewhere.
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Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
It was Bob Palmer who sold everything of DEC to Compaq. Majority DECies were against the selling of DEC to Compaq. They even printed T-shirt internally! the slogan on the T-shirt was something like this "Bob Palmer just fired 75,000 employees!" Rumour has it during the shareholder meetings, there was lotsa protest and jeering by them loyal DECies.
"some of the best in the industry"
You're kidding, right? The original Alpha team was awesome. The Series 7 bunch that Compaq had to hire because everyone else left for AMD after the DEC buyout hasn't put out a chip in 5 years. That's pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, I love Alphas and this is bad news. But the guys they have there now are incompetent.
Don't be stupid. As a friendly Amiga person myself, I'm telling you this in a nice way. Alpha is not a company, it is a product line. They therefore could not have sold themselves. Compaq, a company, bought DEC (and if you knew anything about corporate law, you would know that it would've been very difficult for DEC to say no). Compaq is now selling it off to Intel, because Compaq doesn't have any balls and refuses to market Alpha. Instead, they strive for maximum profits/sale instead of striving for market proliferation. That's the fist step towards killing a product line.
This makes me wonder what will happen to the SMT design. Alpha's overnext chip design (EV8) was desined with support for SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading (-tasking?)). I don't know a lot about that technology, but it's something like the processor running several tasks at the same time, in different pipelines.
The IA-64 runs only one process at a time, and relies on the compiler for optimization (which is a problem for JIT compilers). It also heavily relies on speculative execution, so many calculations might be thrown away later because the speculation was wrong. All of that draws lots of power, resulting in Intel processors being the most power-consuming CPUs around. German computer magazine c't recently tested an Itanium prototype system that had a heat production of 1.8 kilowatt!
I hope Intel didn't purchase Alpha just to get rid of competition, but somehow I doubt that we'll see a merger of IA-64 and EV8....
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
At least we don't see many FUD tactics from intel. I mean, they could shout out all day that AMD makes unstable chips that melt and then turn you sterile. The funny thing is that intel has been trying to move away from the clunky old x86 architecture for a long time now. Itanium wasn't even supposed to be compatible with it originally. But while they know they are riding a dead horse and are trying to get off, it has too much weight behind it. Intel buying Alpha (if they even did BUY Alpha) from compaq could help us get away from x86, a WHOLE lot more than AMD would. While everyone is so worried about monopolies and chips and their precious overclocked athlons, I would rather see would happen if Intel could get a fresh start on a chip. They have the resources, and they aren't lacking for innovation. But the thing that most of their revenue comes from is the thing that they want to get away from. So this is kinda... hard.
Free as in *BUUURP!*
An article on ExtremeTech talks briefly about how API NetWorks will probably shift closer to AMD...(AMD Networks?) http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,2299,s%253D20 1%2526a%253D5663,00.asp