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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.
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!!
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)
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
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.
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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"
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
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.
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...
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"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
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"
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
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."
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
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GreyPoopon
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