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.

Comments

A true shame...

[kakos]

The Alpha was always one of the better processors. It was fast and powerful and way ahead of its time. It is a shame that a truly great processor was killed by the economy and mergers galore. It will be missed.

Re:A true shame...

[sql*kitten]

The Alpha was always one of the better processors. It was fast and powerful and way ahead of its time. It is a shame that a truly great processor was killed by the economy and mergers galore. It will be missed.

What killed it was DEC, whose management were naive enough to believe that great products sell themselves and there's very little need for marketing. Unfortunately for them, engineers don't make purchasing decisions. VMS on Alpha 5 years ago was 10 years ahead of where Solaris on UltraSPARC is now - seriously, in terms of reliability and scalability. VMScluster was a joy to use, and the Alpha gave superb performance for anything involving floating point. They should have owned the high-end workstation market (along with SGI) if technology was all that mattered, but Sun were smart enough to spend lavishly on their marketing, and it paid off massively for them.

If it hadn't been for that, Compaq would never have bought DEC, and would instead be back competing against Dell where they belong. The management of DEC have a lot to answer for - technology and engineering cannot exist in a vaccuum despite what Slashbots think, it goes hand in hand with marketing and sales.

They'll Live to Regret This

[turgid]

HP will live to regret this. They're retiring a mature, stable, established and best-of-breed architecture (Alpha) for an unproven, late, incompatible, expensive, clumsy one (itanium). Their competitors must be laughing all the way to the bank. Just what is HP doing? Why do large corporations make such crazy decisions?

Re:This might just be a good thing

[darkov]

I think this goes to show that it's not just about building a better mousetrap.

No, this is a case of money and influence over technology. Good technology. Bad politics. You could build a processor that executes instructions before they're fetched from memory and the Pentium would still be a best seller.

They're really nothing good about the death of the Alpha.

Re:Still lives within the EV6 AMD Athlon...

[darkov]

Few apps have specifically been optimized for it yet...make apps more multithreaded

This is a reccurring story in the development of parrallelism. It would be great in any form if people just developed for it, but even multithreading is quite tricky to implement compared to a single stream execution environment. And in most apps you just can't get the fine-grained parrallelism that would yield really good speed improvements.

This is a software problem, and no amount of hardware will make a significant difference.

Don't cry over split milk

[ites]

The Alpha was never a Windows machine, obvious from the start. We did several projects on NT/Alpha and the sheer difficulty of getting software for the CPU meant it could never compete with Intel. In the Unix market, the combination of Alpha/Digital Unix was very reliable, and we still support some customers who use this, but frankly we can run the same applications on Linux/Intel and it's unclear what advantages the Alpha boxes give. Lastly, the Alpha/OpenVMS combination gave the best results, because OpenVMS is a really solid OS that makes excellent use of the Alpha. We also support a customer (a large tour operator) who uses this configuration: Alpha/OpenVMS/RDB/ACMS.

DEC's strength was always engineering, not marketing, but they were killed by the commoditization of IT due to the twin forces of IT marketing giants (Compaq, Microsoft, Oracle) and open software (mainly Linux). It's clear today that any advantages the Alpha and/or OpenVMS give are completely wiped out by the cheapness of mass produced solutions.

HP is not taking a big risk betting on Itanium because the CPU is almost entirely irrelevant in today's market. My notebook runs 2-3 times faster than the front-end Alpha's used by our tour operator client, and it's only the lack of decent software such as the multithreading ACMS clients we wrote (able to handle 500+ terminals on a modest Alpha) that prevents us using Linux instead, on whatever box happens to be lying around. (And yes, we'll do a port of ACMS and the multithreaded clients so that our client can switch away from his Alpha/OpenVMS clusters).

Anyhow, the demise of Digital and all their technology was clear from the day Dave Custer and his team went to work for Microsoft on NT.