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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.
Yup, Alphas were good. I would have gone with them for NLE, if they weren't so expensive and if they could run something other than NT/AIX
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.
I think this goes to show that it's not just about building a better mousetrap. You have to build a better mousetrap and then show everyone that it's SO much better than what is out there that it is worth the transition costs. It's something they teach in engineering 101, and it's the same problem microsoft has been bumping into for years now (and basically arm-twisting everyone to upgrade)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Well not one, but.. I know this isn't a big name chip, at least in the PC world, but it's sad to see chip makers go away. One day AMD says it's backing off in its fight, now this one. Let's hope somebody else comes up soon and fights Intel While it's mentioned, anyone know of any up-and-coming chip makers?
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...
I still have a 125Mhz prototype and two 150Mhz ones. It's sad to see such a good architecture end.
The processor on which I discovered for the first time what super-scalar execution meant ...
Also the processor which for some odd reason doesn't support rotate (or was it shift?) operations =)... <sniff still>.
Maybe it's time I actually went out and bought one now, they'll soon be like vintage Cadillacs.
On another note, HP has got some major huevos man, making such a drastic shift in technology requires it.
I sure hope Itaniums happen. 256 integer registers makes me drool.... DROOOOOL
What do you think this is, Mozilla?
It's a shame to see such a ground-breaking chip bite the big one, but one thing to remember is that it's all part of the "circle of life" (now that's corny, isn't it?) Chips & their manufacturers come and go, but, if it weren't for that, we might still be using 586s *shudder*
Processors are getting better (thank god), but so is competition.
-------------
I prefer MS Windows to Linux
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.
sure sounds the same
quality = more money, people. you are all free to drive Yugos if you please.
That aside, my father had an alpha for FreeBSD development, i believe. I used to play Larn on it. before i ever heard the word "final fantasy" Sorry to hear it got sucker punched. (Remember CEO's: If you're not number one, then buy number one and kill it. It's cheaper then investing in R&D.)
shucks.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Then you'll see it for 29.95 on Pricewatch..and not need a fan. I can see it now.. the VIA/Cyrix Alpha DLC!
Distributed computing is going to be the trend...if I can stack together a few cheap chips to rival a single high performance chip, what would I do?
Given the exponential relationship of price to performance (i.e. a marginal performance increase will cost you a LOT more) associated with processors, I'll take the cheaper approach.
Granted, many apps don't fully use distributed processing power, but the ones that need most CPU probably do.
The Alpha chipset was fortold in the aincient scriptures, "I am the ALPHA" God mentioned more than once. This is where it gets interesting -- "And The OMEGA", God added. All of the core prophets prosthesized of Gods eventual metamorpheses to "OMEGA". It is widely believed now by computer industry analysts that they were referring to the coming release of the first Microsoft created CPU and chipset, named "OMEGA".
Bill Gates said at NorCON '02 that Microsofts products in the next five years would become the cornerstone of peoples mental and physical existences, again, he is referring to "OMEGA".
They ran Linux quite nicely. Many Digital engineers had input into Linux
IIRC, Samsung develops Alpha processors, I guess the rumours for Alpha's death are greatly exaggerrated.
It is a sad day for such a beautiful chip which inspired ulsi and even the humble k7 series athlon chips. The alpha chip was indeed a work of art. I remember the day when i first saw one humming away running nt4(of all programs) and the 64bit slots on the mb that it was on! /me plays the final salute song :`(
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
Perhaps this is part of the "inter-industry conspiracy." And the alpha doesn't even have analog outputs... what will they kill next?
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
the high end server market is notorious for being slow to adopt change. Now HP is trying to get rid
of not one but TWO legacy architecture in favor of the unproven itanium.. Though both PA-RISC and
Alpha were niche players, they were highly regarded in their market. Maybe I'm just being a cynic, but
somehow I got a feeling Carly is pulling a SGI and migrating to a platform because everybody ELSE
thought it was a good idea..
Though I'm a big Sun box fan, I still have to give the proper respect for those two well regarded
chips. RIP PA-RISC, Alpha..
-- I have enough stupid gadgets to know that I can do without -- http://www.modestneeds.org
I was lucky enough to have access to a 533 MHz Alpha
That's funny. I'm still using two of those (dual procs) to run calculations. They really do rock.
Alpha's dead? I thought BSD was dead.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I see. So in Soviet Russia your joke would be funny also, yes ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Well there was the Chinese Dragon chip. No DRM/Palladium, but it won't let you access google.
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Damnit, I was just setting up my BeoWulf cluster of 8 Alpha's....and they EOF Alpha, damn, now I wont get ANY support for them at ALL!
Imagine telling this to a geek just back from a 15-year coma:
"HP finally decides to retire Alpha..."
"HP bought Alpha?!"
"Yeah, after they merged with Compaq, which bought DEC..."
"Compaq bought DEC????!!!!!"
Samsung, but maybe they've stopped by now.
Granted, many apps don't fully use distributed processing power, but the ones that need most CPU probably do.
Even after considering the extra money spent to develop an app to scale well with parallel processing, the savings from using multiple "cheap" processors compared to one expensive high performance processor will still make it worth it. Not only that, but then you have an app that you can scale up as needed (assuming it was designed well) without having to purchase a whole new set of hardware, but rather just by adding a couple more processors to your current cluster.
Does this mean they're going to port OpenVMS to x86 or something else, or are they going to EOL that, too? I think I had heard some rumors somewhere of a VMS/x86 port.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Wow... I remember the GIGANTIC PC Computing headline circa mid-1997 proclaiming "Windows at 500Mhz". It seemed so earth-shattering back then... half a gigahertz. :-P
Maybe now that DEC/Compaq/HP is EOLing them, we'll see some really cheap ones start popping up on eBay once PHBs decide they don't want unsupported boxen. I wouldn't mind adding one of these to my collection. Would make a pretty nice linux workstation.
I know they had the megahertz win in the early days against intel, but man I love my alphas. The architecture of the entire system that DEC built around them is just so nice. Maybe it's because I haven't played with any E10K or better hardware from Sun or whatever HP has to compete on that level, but I wouldn't give up my Compaq GS series hardware for anything. Not to mention Tru64 and TruCluster -- I swear Tru64 has the best man pages of any Unix - free or commercial. I often find myself going to the Tru64 pages for info on various standard syscalls.
I don't think it's a wise move for HP -- I wish Compaq had known what they were buying when they bought Digital.
Ok, I've been wanting to ask this question on slashdot for sometime, and this is as good a time as any. Just how much of the Joe sixpack user's stuff is parallelize-able? Can you effeciently farm out quake/UT/Morrowind/Maple/Matlab/etc to multiple processors? (ok, maple and matlab may not be what joe user wants, but you get the idea)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Well, I guess we can all move to Linux or Solaris.
Search first, ask questions later.
I'm going to go and have a nice cry with my XLT 300, after finally getting linux to run on it. I love my Alpha I got mine used from a company called Great lakes computing, I know they still sell them. I got mine for $750 like 5 years ago, and with Debian on it, It Rocks Hard!! Now If you must excuse me, I need to get some kleenex "OH Hal, I have some bad news"
In the days of Pentiums at 3+ GHz and hyperthreading, does it matter that the Alpha CPU is no more ? A PC with dual Xeons and DDR / rambus (for example) is inherently more powerful than those Alpha machines and does the job perfectly.
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.
you come here for new joke? All you could find here are different versions of same beowulf/southpark/russia/simpson/star war jokes. :)
i still have a alpha 533 myself. its a great piece of machinery. too bad i dont really have a use for it anymore and its just sitting in my closet collecting dust.
PS. if anyone wants to buy it off me email me at neonmatrix@homtail.com
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
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?
Stick Men
most likely the Clawhammer / Sledgehammer family - the world moves on, and so do the people who designed the Alpha. It would be good to see govt. earning their keep by actually trying to stop monopolies forming in important industries - diversity = choice, and choice is good. I never used a product that contained an Alpha CPU, but I've never bought an x86 based machine either...
That was classic intercourse!
It would be nice to convert it to Linux (it would be mainly used for LaTeX and Fortran development (Compaq distributes its Fortran 90 compiler for free (beer) for research purposes). Probably the best distro is Debian. Any suggestion?
Signatures are for stupids.
with the roadmap looking bleak for Alpha after the HP-Compaq merger, we are likely to see the last new Alpha generation by 2004.
The efficiency gain by the merger has way beyond Debian Alpha team's imagination!
I started my PhD on an alpha 233 MHz, using jed to edit my c sources. Today, five years latter, while waiting to defend the thesis I'm installing debian on a au500 system, again using jed to edit the sources.
Now this news... It seems like the end of an era.
It seems that HP caught compaqague. A terrible and deadly virus that destroys all the brain zones related to innovation, risk, calculation and self-estimation. Earlier we saw several companies being caught by this epidemics, the most notable, DEC, where the virus spread with such furor that in a question of months a once well-known company turned into another department in the corner of the company.
The fact that HP dropped a lot of its support for open source, closed the production of the Alpha architecture and seems to scale down other important sectors are a clear show that the desease got deeply into the corporation ranks. Soon we probably will see turning from blue to red and naming itself Compaq.
Depressing is right. Can you imagine what kind of chips we'd be seeing if Intel's ungodly amount of financial and engineering resources were being poured into something like the Alpha rather than kludging and hacking the x86 generation after generation?
It is one of my peeves that CPU architectural superiority means little in a world where x86 is the "default", and the negative feedback loop (Intel is cheap -> people buy it -> Intel is cheaper) seems to have no end in sight.
That and the fact that Intel can use its x86 cash cow to keep funding the Itanium whether or not it has any real merit. Not saying that it doesn't (EPIC IS a cool idea), but in a level playing field, do you think they can get away with just throwing so many transistors at the problem?
As various promising architectures die off (Alpha, PA-RISC, who's next? POWER?), in the end, was the computing community better served by the dominance of one architecture designed for the lowest common denominator? It's all speculation, sure, but I think not.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
the Beta never got released...
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
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.
Now is the time for HP to show that it's not just going to waste all the time and effort everyone put into the Alpha.
The now have the opporunitity to publish all information regarding the Alpha to the community so that anyone who wants to can continue to provide support. Or, if anyone wanted to, produce their own Alpha based chips.
By allowing the continued use of the Alpha they could extend the life of these systems instead of killing them off in favour of newer systems. I know that they probably will not want to, but hey, it's a nice guesture to make.
I seem to recall something about "open" processors before, such as an open sparc or something, so this wouldn't be the first time it was done, just the first time that a big corporation allowed it to be done with their 'redundant' interlectual property. I also think that this would be good for preservation purposes and to have more information about micro-processors of our era for future generations. Just look at the mess that NASA have been in before when older components obsolete.
What does a 533 MHz Alpha have to do with a 200 MHz Pentium? You are comparing clock speed of totally different architectures. What one can do in one clock step can be much more (or much less) than what the other can. I'm not saying that Pentium are, or where, faster than Alphas. I've heard that they were really good but, you can't compare CPU performance just by comparing the clock speed. Actually I have a couple of questions. The Alphas are RISC CPUs so, what clock speed do they have to run at to top the Pentium at 3GHz? Will it "fry" the computer?
The whole chain of events with alpha goes something like this...
- DEC creates Alpha
- M$ supports Alpha (Look, we support multiple platforms.)
- M$ drops Alpha support (Look, we support multiple x86 platforms.)
- DEC comes up with Virtual Processor technology.
- Compaq eats DEC
- Compaq get's Intel to make Alphas (...we don't make no stinken' CPUs)
- HP Eats Compaq (Burrrrp!!!...)
- Intel announces HyperThreading with "Virtual Processors" for Xeons
- P4's get HypreThreading
- HP kills Alpha
- The soul of Alpha lives on!!!
>> Practice Safe Hex
Didn't Intel buy the Alpha technology of HP a few months ago ? Guess not.
I never got to play with an Alpha, now I might never get the chance, this sucks.
A better strategy for Alpha might have been to do whatever was necessary to price it not much higher than a corresponding Pentium-based system at the time and get lots of market share and software support quickly. But this would have required deep pockets over several years, and pretty much only Intel can afford to do that.
Now, of course, we are getting a worse mouse trap: Itanium is just a horrendous architecture. It should never have seen the light of day. But Intel will manage to push it on us, whether we want it or not, because pretty much all the alternatives are effectively gone. Only AMD's 64bit chip holds out some promise because you can switch to it without changing over your entire hardware and software infrastructure.
what are the alternatives in terms of cpu these days?
A blog I run for the wealth
RPN-less calculators with rubber keys and flimsy construction without a BIG ENTER key...devices that have drivers only for windows98, killing off very succesful (cpu, but not only) designs...what the hell?
Carly, you fscked it up.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Distributed computing is going to be the trend...if I can stack together a few cheap chips to rival a single high performance chip, what would I do?
Well, Be thought the same thing, and look what happened to them. Turned out one processor per person was enough after all, for the vast majority of users. Or should I say one general-purpose processor per person, a modern graphics card is more powerful than the CPU for its specialized task. And don't forget you won't just have to buy more processors, but the motherboard to support them - compare the prices of single, dual and quad hardware.
Granted, many apps don't fully use distributed processing power, but the ones that need most CPU probably do.
I think you are confused between distributed computing and SMP. They are different design approaches to different problems. A task that executes well (quickly + cheaply) on one won't necessarily execute well on another, even if the CPUs on both are identical.
You've got to have a target audience first. Digital had been slipping for quite a while some due to its outragious support costs. When I was living in Norhtern Virgina in the 80's I had to get a DEC engineer on site for some hardware work and it cost me $5,000.00 just to have him dispatched! I'm a DEC user from the 780 cluster days who moved on to Burroughs, then Unisys, then HP/UX, then Sun back to HP andcurrently am on Sun. Software is always the determining factor on servers.
15 years ago I was lucky to work with a 32 CPU transputer system (T800). The system was very fast, and parallel processing (with Occam) was very easy. But in the end, they had to go as well as today's Alpha
I still have two Alpha 266's sitting silent in my basement. Yes they were ok, but I will remember them for being difficult to boot and load.
I know there are normal learning curve issues, it was my first non-intel platform and there was a lot for me to learn.
However, what I discovered was that I couldn't install the RH 7.1 ISO for Alpha, nor the RH 7.0, I had to go back to RH 6.2. This gave me the impression that people (or at least RedHat) had already given up supporting the platform.
Once it was running, it ran PostgreSQL just fine.
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.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
A while back we had a couple of MCSE's on our site for "job training". One of the tasks we set before them was getting a copy of MS Proxy Server running on an NT machine. Apparently they had no luck getting the "i386" install to work (the machine in question was indeed of the i386 variety), so they tried the install in the "Alpha" directory.
Of course, they got the "unsupported architecture" (or "incompatable binary" or whatever) error and called me in from the next office to see this bizarre message. I had to explain to them that the files in that directory were for the Alpha CPU and they needed to use the ones in i386.
Neither of these MCSEs had even heard of the Alpha. It truly saddened me. I think it was then that I lost what little good impressions of the MCSE certification track that I had left (which was few, trust me).
University - a box of academia nuts.
While HP may be EOLing the Alpha in their products, namely Tru64 UNIX, it's Intel that owns and is killing the Alpha, no?
Let it go in peace
Amen
Has anyone put this to the test -- recompiled Linux or one of the BSDs with P4 optimizations (or just SMP) and noticed any difference?
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The guy was on his way to Woodstock, when he fell asleep for a decade... (The old Rip Van Winkle story)
Jimmy Hendrix DEAD!!! Oh, Nooooooo!!!
Janice Joplin DEAD!!! Oh, Nooooooo!!!
Jim Morrison DEAD!!! Oh, Nooooooo!!!
Jim Croce DEAD!!! Uh...
Who's Jim Croce?
Credit to the "National Lampoon Half-a-Radio Hour"
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Ever heard of Windows NT
Mind you that's more 3 parts VMS + 1 part OS/2 + 1 part MS tedium
If anything they will liscence it out to another company but I'm sure they had to pay money in ther merge for the ALPHA and they aren't going to give it away for free. I mean why help you compitition by giving them free technology you paid for?
I ask because of the line in the news story saying that Compaq divested itself of Alpha and the people behind it - was VMS support cut adrift (in reality, never mind officially)?
And, what are the choices for a shop that runs a still-valuable COBOL-on-VMS-on-Alpha app? Is it Itanium or nothing? And what of a VMS-on-Itanium COBOL compiler? Is this just a very tiny corner to have been painted into?
It kind of makes you wonder what would have happened if DEC had accepted Apple's offer to base PowerMacs on the alpha. Back when Apple was getting ready to leave the venerable M68040 series of chips, it approached DEC and said it wanted to make a deal with them to produce alphas for Macs. The CEO of DEC said no, because he wanted to focus the companies efforts on extending the life of VAX/VMS for one more generation, and getting involved with Apple would be a distraction. Of course, he was fired shortly there after for being a knucklehead, but by then it was too late. Apple had teamed up with Motorola and IBM to develop the PowerPC architecture. Still, you gotta wonder what would have happened if he had had a clue and played with Apple.
I'm glad I got my Alpha when I had the chance, a 21066 chip on a Digital AXPpci 33 motherboard. Sure, it's not one of the fastest ones out there, but I paid $150 for it and it works fine with RH 6.something.
One of these days, I want to snatch up one of several Alpha's on eBay and they have some really nice ones for not much money at all.
For example at this auction, with 5 hours left (at the time I'm writing this) you can get a dual 533MHz Alpha with everything you need for $520, install an OS and you're ready to go. I'd only want to exchange the 6 4.3GB drives for bigger capacities.
It's a pity DEC was even worse at marketing than IBM is. My assembly language book from college talks about how DEC introduced their 16 bit machine in 1976 and how a 32 bit machine may be created one day in the near future but that they'd be prohibitively expensive and never gain widespread popularity due to the price. DEC was comfortably ahead of everyone else for high performance mini-and-desktop computing, and they blew it. Their software always stuck me as very well thought out and easy to work with. There was only one problem -- all the managers were buying IBM. Oh well...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...in the AMD Athlon. Though the Alpha CPU was intersting in it's bolt-on heatsink (VERY well mounted, i liked it). Ohwell, progress must progress. The EV6 bus has served AMD well so far.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Quote from former HP employee I know:
"HP will be a printer company in two years"
Well, I think Be failed for some really different reasons. Just like you can't say, "hey, Mozart is a music genius and see what happened to him - he's dead!"
For PC, yes, one CPU per person is enough - I'd extend that further - one person doesn't even need one CPU. If you think this way, then it's pretty clear why we stack processors together - use 10 CPU configuration to serve 30 users on dumb terminals! Isn't that cheap? I think so...that's what a lot of people do when they're short of $$$.
I think you are confused between distributed computing and SMP. They are different design approaches to different problems. A task that executes well (quickly + cheaply) on one won't necessarily execute well on another, even if the CPUs on both are identical.
No, I'm not confused - just putting them together in order to avoid confusion for the people who read it
On the other hand, multiple CPU on a cluster let's say, is more difficult. There is, I think, 1 or 2 good OS that would help you do the job, but it's not trivial and require participation on your part. For example, LAM/MPI, a very common and 'easy' approach, is still requires pretty explicit communication code in your programs.
I mean it was really early. The environment was that we cross compiled/linked the image on a VAX, copy the image to dual mounted disk, dismount the disk, boot Alpha and mount the disk and run the image. No debugger. When the image crashed, I got register dump. Not even stack trace. Network to the box was Digital's LAT (Local Area Transport), so I used Xlib over that transport.
I think I spend a couple weeks there. In 2nd week, we got debugger, version X.0001 or something. When I finally got our library to start running some simple rendering test, the picture didn't look right. A squre cube looked very distorted. Run a quick test of trigonometry functions. Hmmm, sin() returning value bigger than 1.0 didn't look right. Was told that I was a first one to excersize floating point on their chip. It was fixed shortly and we got nice pictures drawn.
I was told that we were the first external customer to run code on Alpha. And of course, we were doing all that work on the only ture operating systerm on Alpha: VMS :-)
Another interesting but far less practical project I got involved later was to try out Digital's binary translator which translated DECstation (MIPS) Ultrix's binary image into Digital Unix (or was it still OSF/1) Alpha binary image. It was pretty impressive. It took our image, which was more than 40M on Ultrix (about 6million lines of PL/I, C and Fortran), and created image more than 80M of size. It was still maintaining whole MIPS image inside it because it has to interpret the MIPS binary in some complicated situation. I think it was for something like exception handling which our PL/I code heavily used. After they fixed the last problem regarding this exception handling, the translated image actually passed through our basic regression test suite. I was not involved but there was also VAX/VMS to Alpha/VMS binary translator, which we played with too. If I remember correctly, some VMS softwares on early Alpha/VMS were actually binary translated images. We never shipped anything using those translators (it is pretty much impossible to debug the translated image), but it was a interesting excersize.
Hiroto
Architecture-wise.
...and once somebody builds a cluster for the Intel, the "ideal" thing advantage is pretty much gone - if you choose to use a cheap Linux cluster framework (e.g. beowulf!) and don't insist on reinventing the wheel.
Making a distributed framework were easier on the Alphas than the Intels....but most the time you only do it once - you can say it is a one time overhead.
Alpha processors were more expensive, and suffers from most of the disadvantages a less popular product generally suffers (less support, less programmers, etc) compared to Intel and AMD.
That's why when the x86's finally catches up with parallelization, Alpha is destined to go away...
There are a few niches where distributed computing is really useful. So far best examples have been, let's see, cracking encryption and searching for ET.
There are many reasons why distributed computing is not "the" general solution for need-for-speed... here are some of the obvious ones:
And finally, like somebody else mentioned, perhaps you are mixing SMP and DC here a bit; SMP has fewer problems and is where I see the future, more than with distribution (actually, more than SMP, processor-level multi-threading).
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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!
I can't say I miss them, cuz they're still here! DEC (Sorry, they perfer to be called Digital Equipment Corperation or Digital I think.) really did they're job too well in developing these guys.
However, HP's being smart. Since the research is being done with other architechtures, it's best to follow suite.
I fell in love with these boxes upon the first boot...Having "more" and "cat" in the bios just rocked my world. I wish others would have taken the hint!
-=fshalor
This is good news for manangment everywhere.
No more this constant nagging about updating
servers. Alpha has reached it's omega. No more
upgrades ever necessary or possible.
What will they use in future Cray machines? It would suck if they used Pentiums in them. Sort of like James Bond driving a Lincoln.
and the Alpha architecture earned a special place in my heart.
Wow! That must be one heck of a pacemaker.
Have you read my journal today?
... was DEC's adoption of exclusionary tactics. Smack dab in the middle of the interoperability wars that bestowed fleeting fame on AT&T UNIX, DEC decided to build walls around every product they made. OSF/1 may have been a superior O/S but it wasn't SVR4 and it wasn't FIPS compliant, and for a while we couldn't purchase it. And a just a little while later, it didn't matter.
Ken Olsen was spot on with his snake oil pronouncement, but it helped kill the company.
This is only to be expected, and I was actually expecting it to be announced about six months ago.
Carly Fiorina has made it clear that HP is no longer a technology company, but a sales company. They are no longer willing to take risks, they are no longer willing to develop new ideas and different architectures, and very ironcally, they are no longer willing to invent. If you need proof, just look at their nearly-dead calculator division.
The Alpha is dead. RPN is nearly dead. The spirits of Hewlett and Packard are dead, and Carly is going to make a very successful printer sales company by killing them. Unfortunately.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
As proud owner of several alphastations (200 4/166 (FreeBSD, NAT), 255 4/300 (Linux, MTA), 500/333 (OpenBSD, Firewall)) and servers (As 800 5/500 (FreeBSD, Web Server), As 2100A 5/375 (FreeBSD, Web Server), i cannot help but lament the fate of my trusty friend. Apart from an excellent processor, the systems it was built into were (mostly) masterpieces of engineering, with well balanced memory buses, quality peripherals, good chassises, etc. My way of saying goodbye will be one more purchase (Used ES40)
Besides, did you know that the firmware had an x86 emulator just to be able to boot up x86 PCI cards, i used to have a Creative Labs Permedia2 video card that, when booting, showed an animated logo. Accurately enough, the logo also appeared on the alphastation, as the card was booted of the firmware emulator.
Regards
Roberto at spock dot cl
"I'd think HP would keep it around just so IBM doesn't take over the top spots for supercomputers."
After studying a number of processors indepthly and doing a research project with the Alpha, I came to the realization that the Alpha engineers were truly the best in the world. (My next favorites were the highly-scalable SPARC by Sun, and the PowerPC, another very smart RISC processor by IBM, Motorola, and Apple.) I had also read a book about the pains the Alpha engineers went through to design a processor so far ahead of its time. For some reason, however, DEC couldn't stay afloat and the company exchanged hands a number of times, and, presummably, lost a lot of their engineers. Compaq inherits the company, and merges with HP. Funny thing is HP was already in bed with Intel and helped design the 64-bit Itanium. Now, even though Alpha had gone 64-bit since around 1995, it doesn't make sense for HP to compete with Intel using the Alpha, after all its efforts to help Intel create the Itanium and monopolize the 64-bit market.
When something like this happens, there is always guaranteed to be a fall guy. Before you know it, Alpha, the most outstanding processor in the world, is history.
Dave Cutler and his team from DECWest moved up the hill to Microsoft as a result of DEC killing their Prism project. (which is one of the biggest reasons DEC is now a department of the Compaq division of HP)
Also, Alpha was a great Windows machine. It ran Windows NT beautifully and what little software there was ran very well. It's interesting to note that you wouldn't have had trouble finding software for Alpha Windows NT if you'd been able to go with all Microsoft stuff. MS software was, for years, available in Alpha versions.
The EOL may be today, but the massive R&D effort necessary to keep a high-end CPU architecture in the game ended a long time ago. Even if HP reversed course, they'd be starting from scratch, in a sense. The real end of the Alpha happened some time ago, probably during or not long after the DEC/Compaq merger.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Remember, HP is killing off PA-RISC as well as Alpha. There have been a number of comments by HP executives recently that they don't hope to turn a profit in the enterprise business for some time because of Itanium costs.
However, the combined Alpha and PA-RISC business is now larger than Sun.
For HP to have executed this merger in a way that retained customers (which they have not), they would have had to deliver EV8. That they have not done so seals their fate. Carly has partnered so much that no one at HP runs the company any longer (to say nothing of what they are doing to their resellers).
alpha has been a superior architecture to anything intel has had for a long time. even after intel bought alpha's secrets, the itanium has been overdue and unimpressive in comparison.
intel has tried to kill the alpha several times. first coming out of dec, then tried to have it killed at compaq.
when compaq announced the demise of the alpha, universities, government research centers, corporations, and users like yourself, all made contact with compaq in a grassroots effort to save the chip-- or at least to make the real reasons for it's termination clear.
the result was that alpha pulled their 'alpha is dead' website and re-emerged with the 'alpha is king' site... much to the chagrin of intel. it's easy to see intel's hand behind the scenes in the corporate cocaine room-- in this particular case, the hp- compaq merger. hp already sold their soul for the itanium blowjob a while back.
the press will not call for action on the murder of the alpha, they simply parrot the lines issued from the corporations. what we are witnessing is the cold blooded and calculated termination of a true technology for the sake of corporate empire.
alpha was made with true intent and has an architecture that has yet to hit the limit.
don't sit back.
the Save Alpha (again) crew will be picking up steam shortly.
We'll have to see how it all turns out in a few years.
Talking about failed technically superior products, does anyone here remember National Semiconductor's 32032 and 32332 chips?
I had a friend who's brother bought one on an expansion card for his IBM PC-XT. I think it was made by Microway, but my memory is a bit hazy now. Man that thing could fly. The architecture was a thing of beauty... writing assembler was a really enjoyable experience. Everything was just... right.
Unfortunately they had bad problems with reliabilty and bugs in the first couple of iterations, and by the time they ramped up to cruising speed the market had passed them by.
I learnt assembler, Fortran and C on that board, and it took me years to see its performance matched by Intel's 80386.
Actually, the Athlon is a RISC CPU that translate x86 instructions into it's own instructions. I don't know if that is because it's based on the Alpha or not, but I had heard the above from some people who should know whether it was true or not.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
that's a good wordplay. Mod's, even if you don't get it, I do...so mod the above up please. "Huevos in one basket..." hahahaha.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
It's just on pause for a while. The next technology in CPUs will probably bring it back. "Tired of needing 1,000 node clusters to do your simulations? Try new QuantumCpu3000Pro! And do the work of 1,000 old machines with one computer!"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You will be missed, Alpha!
if I can stack together a few cheap chips to
rival a single high performance chip, what would I do?
You'd probably fly to work on a unicorn, and eat sunshine and moonbeams for lunch, because you'd be in Fantasy Land.
(Given today's existing products and sufficiently meaningful values for 'a few', 'cheap', 'rival', and 'high performance', that is)
LOL.. this is the first slashdot article i read on my new(second hand) pws alpha..
I noticed this week that development on the venerable z80, described as a microprocessor back in the day, but now relegated to the world of the "microcontroller" continues - with chips being etched on/placed on glass and certainly I still have a working one in my Gameboy Color.
But the z80 is a technology that is over a quarter of a century old - the gap between us and it is nearly as big as between it and "Colossus". So why is it still in use, but the Alpha is to die?
Sure the z80 is cheaper than running water but remember all you get is an addressable 65k and, what, 2 Mhz?
Old HP - "Invent."
New HP - "Merge, layoff, go out of business."
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Riddle me this folks. Alpha's speed was partly because it was RISC, which meant it could be clocked higher due to the simpler instruction set => simpler pipelines => no microcode (I think RISC didn't need microcode...)
So why do PowerPC chips, really the only mass-market RISC alternative, lag behind the grossly complex x86 chips in clock speed? Mac chips just broke 1GHz, while intel is sitting at 3 GHz. Doing simplistic multiplication, the Alpha-Intel speed difference of yore means that PowerPCs should be scorching at 4-5Ghz, even if Intel has borrowed as many RISC tricks and sacrificed Mhz for good design. Anyone know why?
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Am i the only one who thinks that Compaq's (one of Intel's largest customers) buyout of DEC
when I forwarded the article to a friend who has worked there for 20+years. His answer:
****
This is really old news.
Compaq announced migration from Alpha to IPF (Itanium Platform Family) June 25, 2001.
When we announced the HP-Compaq merger September 4, 2001, we further announced:
Alpha => IPF in 2004-2005
PA-RISC => IPF migration ongoing (they had planned this for several years already)
Himalaya [Tandem] migration from MIPS to IPF in 2004-2005
We're introducing Alpha EV7 / Marvel systems now, with EV79 systems 1 year from now. This will be the last Alpha systems, although we will sell them, and support them until 2011 minimum.
VMS will be ported to IPF. Tru64 UNIX (primarily TruClusters) will be merged with HP-UX.
Quick ! Someone mod down this troll !
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
what on Earth are you ranting about?
I've personally bought these computers - Commodore 64 (Z80), Amiga 500+ (Moto 68000), Mac Colour Classic (Moto 68030), Mac Quadra 800 (Moto 68040), Newton MP 2100 (StrongARM sa 110), PowerMac G4 (2 x Moto MPC 7410) and, finally, a Sony Clie SJ-30 (Moto Dragonball EZ).
So, as I said, no Alphas in that lot and no x86s either.
That was classic intercourse!
Multprocessing is different. You just need some good locking primitives and ways to keep caches coherent with the necessary connections brought out of the chip. If the architecture doesn't support multiprocessing, it is very, very hard to graft it on later.
I think the Power4 has a real shot at taking over the customers that Alpha used to serve. It has a Real Company behind it, not a succession of laughing-stocks. I think AMD won't be able to match Power4's performance, because of all the x86 baggage.
On the other hand, IBM doesn't seem to want to market Power4 agressively, nor price it competitively in price/perf with x86. I think they could sell a lot of them if they could offer 1.5x perf at less than 2.5x the price.
If they come out with a version of the Power4 which uses significantly less power as well, it'd be very interesting to those who set up clusters of computers, as it'll reduce demand on infrastructure.
PeterM
While the Alpha architecture has been "killed" (per comments on comp.os.vms), it will last quite a while in it's death throes.
HP states (in the article):
"Although HP plans to stop developing new Alpha chips, the company has said it will keep selling Alpha-based systems as long as there is
customer demand, likely until 2006. "
That should really read: "likely until AT LEAST 2006". Alpha sales have by no means tapered off since the original EOL announcement in June of 2001.
Has everyone noticed that all the letters of the word "database" are
typed with the left hand? Now the layout of the QWERTYUIOP typewriter
keyboard was designed, among other things, to facilitate the even use
of both hands. It follows, therefore, that writing about databases is
not only unnatural, but a lot harder than it appears.
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