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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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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
Alpha's dead? I thought BSD was dead.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
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
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????!!!!!"
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.
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.
And I still wonder why they dropped ULTRIX way back when. That's gotta be the coolest OS name ever.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
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????
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 $750 like 5 years ago, and with Debian on it, It Rocks Hard!! Now If you must excuse me, I need to get some kleenex "OH Hal, I have some bad news"
Um, the Alpha was ideal for that. Dick Sites, the main architect used to work for Cray and he used a lot of ideas to make Alphas work well together. You want 16 processors, it will do it and do it well.
if they could run something other than NT/AIX
*cough* freebsd *cough*
bash$
Wow, you have P4 Xeons that are 64-bit processors and can support 20gigs+ of memory? No? Then how can you call them more powerful than an EV6 Alpha?
I will miss the Alphas, they were doomed the moment that Intel got control of them.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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
"Can you effeciently farm out quake/UT/Morrowind/Maple/Matlab/etc to multiple processors?"
The answer is yes... sortof...
Quake/UT are 3d First Person Shooter games. This means that as far as the client side goes (Joe sixpack's computer) there is no immediate advantage. Most processing power is done on rendering in real time, which can't be done on more than one host (however, its still possible to do it on more than one video card, or multiple CPU systems in SMP mode).
However, on the Quake/UT server side, everything changes. Most of the multiplayer games are limited by 1) network bandwidth and 2) cpu power when it comes to scaling (limits usually around ~32 users). Battlefield 1942 (kindof like RTCW) is an excellent example of a game that could dramatically imporve by distributed computing. For one thing, that game's server is dramatically CPU limited. You can't get more than ~32 clients(out of a 64 person max) out of a server with acceptable results, even on a 100Mbit switched LAN. However, if you could distribute out the server, have maybe 2, 3, 20 servers, each in charge of 1/2, 1/3, 1/20th of the users in the game (sortof like IRC chat) then you could successfully scale to any # of users without having any CPU scaling issues. I think everquest might have a hint of this type of technology.
I don't know the answer about things like Maple or Matlab, but I'm pretty sure they could at least take advantage of distributed computing a little. (again, depends on how you use it)
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
HP-UX already runs on Itanium, they sell IA-64 HPUX boxes.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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...
... 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.
And HP is putting all those huevos in one basket...
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
"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.
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)
Old HP - "Invent."
New HP - "Merge, layoff, go out of business."
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!