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End In Sight For Alpha
minektur writes "news.com has an article stating that DEC ... I mean Compaq .... Uh, I mean HP has decided to EOL the once mighty Alpha architecture. Let's all take a moment of silence." I was lucky enough to have access to a 533 MHz Alpha back when the fastest Pentiums were only around 200 MHz, and the Alpha architecture earned a special place in my heart. It will be missed.
AMD sure had it right with its decision of making the Athlon Architecture based on the Alpha...to the point that it outlived the Alpha itself...
IIRC, Samsung develops Alpha processors, I guess the rumours for Alpha's death are greatly exaggerrated.
Which is now known as Tru64. Of course, depending on what manual page you look at it, the name varies from OSF/1 to Digital UNIX to Tru64.
kc8apf
Um, the Alpha was ideal for that. Dick Sites, the main architect used to work for Cray and he used a lot of ideas to make Alphas work well together. You want 16 processors, it will do it and do it well.
Loosey operating systems. ULTRIX was immature and buggy
AFAIK, Alphas never ran Ultrix. They ran OSF/1 (later renamed Tru64). The first true 64-bit OS released 10 years ago which still beat newer attempts in good, clean 64-bit design (including, for example, HP-UX).
VMS was VMS (some people love it, not sure why)
They run it because of the reliability and clustering capabilities. Which VMS had 15 years ago and no UNIX yet has emulated...
It was a memory hog. With a "int" set to 64 bits as standard
No, an int was 32 bits. A long (and void*) were 64 bits, just as it SHOULD be.
See LP64
and each machine instruction taking up a lot of room (256 bits I think)
Have you ever used an Alpha? Each instruction is 32 bits long.
)9TSS
As the parent post shows, another possible up-and-coming processor is the via cyrix. It's a slower, lower performance processor like the celeron or duron, but it's also the coolest running processor that I know of. It can usually operate fine with nothing more than a standard heatsink! How many 1Ghz processors do you know of that can do that? I mean standard heatsinks, not this too... c'mon.
win9x and xp home don't support SMP
Windows XP Home does not support more than one Physical CPU, however it does support Hyperthreading (ie. more than one logical CPU). Though this is not true SMP, using SMP techniques for coding and compiling applications can yield performance increases on HT capable CPU's - and since the latest desktop P4 has HT enabled, Joe Public will soon be able to take advantage of Multiprocessor aware apps, even on XP Home.
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
No kidding. I really can't imagine why it is being dropped. I'd think HP would keep it around just so IBM doesn't take over the top spots for supercomputers.
Right now, the Alpha is firmly holding spots 2, 3, 6, 7, 18, 47, 57, 58, 59, 63, 79, 109, 110, 117, 118, 144, 179, 217, 245, 246, 337, 340, and 355 on the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers.
Sure, they can replace those slower systems with their other systems, but what about the 4 Alphas in the top 10 spots? What does HP have that can rival them in performance, while still keeping the prices down? I'd say if they kept the Alpha, rather than their own processors, they'd have a chance at finally gaining ground on the hi-end Unix server market where IBM and Sun dominate.
But, there's always hope for Alpha fans. Intel bought the technology, so if their new 64-bit processor (which shatters compatibility anyhow) doesn't perform well enough, they could just start making Alphas and call them their own.
AFAIK, there's nothing stopping Samsung (or anyone else involved) from continuing to build Alpha processors... Maybe API will try to keep the Alpha alive. It's been a good product for them for some time.
Or perhaps some other party might pick up the torch. Sun would be a good candidate, since they're in a tight competition with IBM, and the Alpha seems to be the only thing to top IBM's Power3 (and is doing so with half the number of processors!!!).
Come on HP. The Alpha has just as loyal a following as Apple... It's a big mistake not to start improving it and seeing what it can really do for you.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Don't forget Digital's groundbreaking FX32 emulation software. FX32 allowed you to run x86 Windows software on Alpha NT. The cool part was that after running for a while in slow software emulation, FX32 went back through the x86 code and translated the hotspots into native Alpha code. It was not unusual for translated x86 applications to run faster under FX32 than they did on contemporary x86 machines!
(FX32 was a major help for the visual effects industry, where Alphas were really popular at one point - 3D apps like Lightwave were available in native Alpha versions, but all the support tools, like Photoshop, were not...)
No, this is a case of money and influence over technology.
No, I think this is a case of poor marketing. It's a superior product, so much so the competetion even bought into it.. but the product was saddled with two companies who couldn't market the product. Digital was notoriously poor in marketing, and when Compaq bought them it was merely a product-rounding move. Compaq, after all, made their money in Intel-based crap and Capellas never really pushed the Alpha as the strong superior product it was.
The Alpha was a decent hardware/OS setup: I ran a number of them at my last job, supporting boxen using Oracle. The boxes were solid computers (even for older 4100-series machines!), Tru64 was fairly solid (only a tricky NFS glitch on one machine spotted a perfect record with them) and the 1 1/2 years I spent with Dec/Compaq/Tru64 was suprisingly excellent. It's a shame the companies involved pretty much killed them due to stupidity.
-'fester
Look at the archived results on the SPEC website. (You'll have to do the arithmetic yourself, they only provide scores, not scores/Mhz.)
Sorry, but people didn't buy Alphas for those reasons. They didn't buy Alphas because DEC couldn't sell the devil a glass of ice water.
We still have a DEC Alpha 2100 here. Bought it in 1994. Aside from hardware maintenance, the thing never goes down. We've upgraded the hard drives and the memory, but otherwise, we've left it alone. It accomplishes the job we want it to do.
OpenVMS is stable. You can't break it. When DEC built something, they built it to run pretty near forever. That may have been their problem: no built-in obsolescence.
I'll say about the Alpha what I said a while back about Unix to a bunch of pseudo-geeks on a credit union list: If you've never used it, you wouldn't understand, and we can't explain it to you. If you want reliability, you use something that can do the job. Alphas and OpenVMS did the job.
Of course, now maybe our data processing company will get off the stick and at least do some research about offering a Unix-based platform.
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
Also spots 39 and 40, since the Cray T3E is basically a very fast toroidal interconnect and Alpha processors.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; int y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
Why would you say 'int y = 1/2 * x' anyway? Using 'int y = x / 2' is more efficient, and you get the answer you expect (1).
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
We'll have to see how it all turns out in a few years.
Old HP - "Invent."
New HP - "Merge, layoff, go out of business."
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
... what do they have left? Reselling Intel boxes and perhaps some consulting.
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P R I N T E R S
And scanners, digital cameras, PDAs, etc..
Dropping two proven workstation/server architectures in favor of an unproven processor from a consumer-grade processor manufacturer doesn't sound too wise to me, but HP has advantages in the PC market.
When I was out of work and desperate for money I took a job selling computers retail at a large office store. I was surprised at how some people wanted their PC, scanner, camera, PDA, printer and other accessories to have the same brand name on them. They really think it helps them all work together, and they may be right: one company to call if you're having trouble printing your digital photo through your PC and printer. That means a lot to a non-geek.
And I presume the PC add-ons have higher profit margins that the PCs themselves.