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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!
They ran Linux quite nicely. Many Digital engineers had input into Linux
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????!!!!!"
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????
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$
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
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
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."
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.
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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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