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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.
Screw Itanium. An architecture that requires a highly-tuned compiler to optimize software well enough that it doesn't stutter from huge branch prediction misses is not a worthy successor to the Alpha. Excellent firmware, elegant architecture, good speed/MHz ratio...
I own three Alphas (a Personal Workstation 600, an Alphastation 255, and a homebuilt machine using a PC64+ motherboard), and they're great machines to use. I'm currently on the lookout for an ES40 - when I see one for below a couple of thousand dollars, I'm going to snap it up.
They ran Linux quite nicely. Many Digital engineers had input into Linux
VMS Engineers are well along in the port to Itaniac. The port will be relatively easy because of the portability built into VMS during the VAX->Alpha port and the fact that the memory management in Itaniac looks a lot like the VAX. This according to a VMS Engineer who spoke at a conference I attended in Nashua NH (where the VMS engineers are).
I think I had heard some rumors somewhere of a VMS/x86 port.
Won't this silly rumor ever die????
So, why do they favour Itanium over proven hardware like PA-RISC and Alpha? Simple: software. Alpha's epitaph was written the day Microsoft decided to stop NT development for Alpha's. Without commercial software, what's good hardware worth?
My answer would be: A LOT! A few years ago I bought a (once expensive) 266MHz Alpha for about $300, without any software. It took a while to get Red Hat 6 running, but the machine really rocks! As most of us know, Linux per se does *not* require x86 hardware. I guess you could even go through the trouble of getting Wine to run Win32 binaries under Bochs, if performance is not your primary issue. However, in my daily usage I hardly ever need anything outside Linux. In those cases - when someone sends me a Word document - I use and old Toshiba laptop, running Mandrake.
So why is x86 hardware the de facto standard Linux hardware? Good: price/performance ratio. Why is x86 relatively cheap? Large sales volumes. Why so? Windows won't run on anything else. Why do people buy Windows? Because everyone does.
It's just the everlasting circle that won't be broken anytime soon. Not by better hardware (Alpha, PowerPC, MIPS, StrongARM) and not by better software (Linux, BSDs other Unices). It's so depressing...
--
Programming is like sex... make one mistake, and support it the rest of your life
Looks like HP is changing from an engineering company to a bunch of vacuum cleaner salesmen, like say, Dell. They spun off their measurement systems stuff (Agilent), killing PA-RISC and alpha, what do they have left? Reselling Intel boxes and perhaps some consulting.
On the other hand, chip development costs seem to grow exponentially, so keeping on developing two high-end architectures for a very small market doesn't really make sense economically.
HP has been 'getting rid' of PA-RISC for ages. I remember attending an seminar on the virtues of Merced in the 1996-1997 timeperiod. At that time they planned phased out PA-RISC CPUs and were going to do PA emulation on Itanium by 2000 at the latest, to allow older HPUX installations to make a smooth transition.
In other words.. they'be been singing this song for at least 5 years and the Merced/cKinley delays have royally screwed their plans. They did have other plans on the horizon (though at the time I believe the roadmap only went to the 8500 or 8600 chips.. the 8700+ processors were probably a mad scramble when they realized it was going to be even longer.
-'fester
Because HP is already committed to IPF (IA-64, Itanium) and thinks it will become better than what Alpha could be. That's the official story. The unofficial is that they gave up competing on products a long time ago, and now just want to do services. Presumably that's a mixture of dumb MBAs who repeat the "services are key" mantra without understanding you must have a product to service, and if you didn't manufactured it, its manufacturer is more likely to service it than you; and of realising that people want Wintel or Lintel "just because they are used to it", and because of volume driving down prices.
In other words, the RISC market was too fragmented, and instead of coordinating the RISCs by phasing out PA-RISC and going all the way Alpha they decided to instead try to sell Intel on their VLIW, and thus IPF was born. To be fair, the first blunder was Digital's when they failed to win Apple and Novell as Alpha users, then consequently to make Alpha a volume architecture with several licensees, OEMs, foundries, notebook versions and all that you need to go heads on against a monopoly.
First, they do believe in IPF, or so it seems.
Second, is being in the top 500 supercomputers list important at all? I guess they'd rather be lucrative. I think the way they chose to be lucrative is mistaken, but that's probably their rationale.
Actually the PA-RISC has a nice position. Telcos tend to use predominantly the SuperDomes, due to HP's relationship with Amdocs. PA-RISCs are actually nice systems, and HP builds some nice systems around them. HP-UX isn't GNU/Linux or Solaris, but still it's Unix, so you can't throw it away. Too bad for them that Unisys will sell IPF machines that will be as nice as HP's, and so will other vendors, and some of them will have GNU/Linux or Unix to run on them.
There isn't, see below.
I doubt. Intel bought the patents and the documents, but most engineers left. Intel has lousy employee relationship, so they wouldn't be able to reproduce the in-house expertise Digital, Silicon Graphics, HP (before merge) had and that IBM, Sun now have. Also, they are already forcing customers to change the architecture. Would they risk it again, knowing each change in architecture is a chance of jumping ship to someone else with a better story to tell, like IBM or Sun?
First, there is no one else involved, only Samsung.
Second, Samsung can't compete. It does not have neither the focus, nor the ISVs, nor the customers, nor the applications, nor the systems, nor nothing needed to compete. Sun & IBM do, HP, Digital and Silicon Graphics had.
I doubt. Technically yes, but where are the volumes, the customers, the profits? Anyway they already jumped ship. They are now SiPackets, former API Networks, selling the HyperTransport stuff to AMD and the like.
Forget it. Licenses are not available for the asking, even if you had loads of money. And you would have to get the engineers, and find the customers. Do you think anyone would, after the .com bubble?
Sun has already stated SPARC for them is binary compatibility and a viable future, not performance only. Their going Alpha would hurt more than help. They hope to get UltraSPARC to be competitive with POWER and IPF, and that's it.
There is a difference. There was never MS Office running on the Alpha, only MS Word and Excel, and these are gone now. There was never an Alpha notebook. Alphas and Macs were never in the same price bracket.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
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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.
I thought that Intel bought the manufacturing arm and licensed some patented technologies (whatever DEC sued Intel over to begin with) and the right to manufacture Alphas, but not the whole intellectual rights to the Alpha architecture itself (which Compaq got)? So while Intel could certainly churn out Alphas, they could only churn out existing versions and not create new ones?
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!!!).
Egads, Sun would never abandon Sparc. They have spent billions on just simply developing the name in the marketplace, and to suddenly switch gears and drop Sparc to sell Alpha would be suicide. Most people who purchase Sun don't do it because their stuff is faster than anyone elses (because in general they are not), they buy it for the stability of the hardware and OS. Sun has been able to thrive even they've always been in the role of the lessor performer. Note that there aren't too many Sun's in the Top500, Sun just isn't that interested in that market.
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.
No, it's a big mistake to try to sell computers using three different architectures (four if you count the overlap between PA-RISC and Itanium). It makes no sense at all to keep Alpha around (as much as I like Alpha). They've already bought into Itanium and PARISC still has legs while they wait for Itanium to mature. Now they can surely integrate more concepts from Alpha into future chips, but Alpha as an independent entity has no useful purpose in the HP landscape.
Maybe Transmeta will buy the rights and finally get a little oomph into those chips of theirs.