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End In Sight For Alpha

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the out-with-a-bang dept.

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.

26 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. A true shame... by kakos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:A true shame... by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:A true shame... by evilviper · · Score: 5, Informative
      Alpha gets added to the list of failed, technicaly better products.

      No kidding. I really can't imagine why it is being dropped. I'd think HP would keep it around just so IBM doesn't take over the top spots for supercomputers.

      Right now, the Alpha is firmly holding spots 2, 3, 6, 7, 18, 47, 57, 58, 59, 63, 79, 109, 110, 117, 118, 144, 179, 217, 245, 246, 337, 340, and 355 on the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers.

      Sure, they can replace those slower systems with their other systems, but what about the 4 Alphas in the top 10 spots? What does HP have that can rival them in performance, while still keeping the prices down? I'd say if they kept the Alpha, rather than their own processors, they'd have a chance at finally gaining ground on the hi-end Unix server market where IBM and Sun dominate.

      But, there's always hope for Alpha fans. 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.

      AFAIK, there's nothing stopping Samsung (or anyone else involved) from continuing to build Alpha processors... Maybe API will try to keep the Alpha alive. It's been a good product for them for some time.

      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!!!).

      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.
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    3. Re:A true shame... by leandrod · · Score: 5, Interesting
      > I really can't imagine why it is being dropped.

      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.

      > I'd think HP would keep it around just so IBM doesn't take over the top spots for supercomputers.

      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.

      > I'd say if they kept the Alpha, rather than their own processors, they'd have a chance at finally gaining ground on the hi-end Unix server market where IBM and Sun dominate.

      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.

      > But, there's always hope for Alpha fans.

      There isn't, see below.

      > 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 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?

      > AFAIK, there's nothing stopping Samsung (or anyone else involved) from continuing to build Alpha processors...

      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.

      > Maybe API will try to keep the Alpha alive. It's been a good product for them for some time.

      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.

      > Or perhaps some other party might pick up the torch.

      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 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

      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.

      > The Alpha has just as loyal a following as Apple...

      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.

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    4. Re:A true shame... by binaryDigit · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Still lives within the EV6 AMD Athlon... by SirDaShadow · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    1. Re:Still lives within the EV6 AMD Athlon... by kc8apf · · Score: 5, Informative

      The speed increases on the p4 is due to the use of a 22 stage pipeline. The Athlon and Alpha do not have nearly that long a pipeline and as such do not scale in Mhz as easily, but they get more work done per clock, hence why a slower Athlon is on par with a p4.

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      kc8apf
    2. Re:Still lives within the EV6 AMD Athlon... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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...

      They only licensed the bus architecture. Nothing else...

    3. Re:Still lives within the EV6 AMD Athlon... by Chasing+Amy · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is true, but hyperthreading seems to have great potential for fixing the weaknesses inherent in having such a long pipeline. Few apps have specifically been optimized for it yet, but even so it provides a small to large increase in productivity depending on how many threads you have going at once and how much each app is optimized for hyperthreading or dual processors. The benchmarks posted at places like Anandtech and Tom's Hardware demonstrate this, even at this early stage.

      Add to that the fact that Intel is pushing for developers to compile using optimizations for hyperthreading and dual processors, and to make apps more multithreaded, and you get an even greater likelihood of performance increases in the future. The cost of that long pipeline is clearly being lowered, and P4 with hyperthreading can get more done per clock cycle than the P4 without.

      I was one of the people who laughed at Intel when the P4 was released in its original incarnation, believing the Athlon's Alpha-like brute force would continue to trounce the comparatively puny NetBurst architecture at every turn. But in the end, the larger cache, faster FSB, and now Hyperthreading ability of the newer P4, seem to be adding up to be just as valuable as the P4's GHz scalability.

      All I can say is, brute force doesn't seem to cut it any more. Intel is finally improving the little things, and not just clockspeed. The fact that next year Intel is planning to move to an 800MHz effective FSB with matching dual-channel 400MHz DDR memory just goes to show that. Who ever would have thought? :-)

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    4. Re:Still lives within the EV6 AMD Athlon... by darkov · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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  3. Maybe VIA will buy it off of HP! by Newer+Guy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  4. Or Linux... by anonymous+cupboard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They ran Linux quite nicely. Many Digital engineers had input into Linux

  5. Alpha? by JanusFury · · Score: 5, Funny

    Alpha's dead? I thought BSD was dead.

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  6. Re:Alphas by kc8apf · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    kc8apf
  7. Unbelievable by jsse · · Score: 5, Funny

    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????!!!!!"

    1. Re:Unbelievable by RajivSLK · · Score: 5, Funny

      A geek who who awoke from a 15 year comma would probably be put in a lab and studied.

      "Dr. you say this geek has no knowledge of 'Slashdot'? Truely amazing..."

      They would probably put throw him into a basement in the depths of IBM to write legacy code for 15 year old applications. Unaware of recent advents such as 'the web', 'slashdot' and 'massive internet pr0n archives' he would be the most productive geek ever.

  8. Re:OpenVMS for x86? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Does this mean they're going to port OpenVMS to x86 or something else, or are they going to EOL that, too?

    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????

  9. Re:The day of a single very powerful CPU is over.. by anonymous+cupboard · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:Alphas by MavEtJu · · Score: 5, Funny

    if they could run something other than NT/AIX

    *cough* freebsd *cough*

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  11. Alpha and Linux by Koos+Baster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    --
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  12. They'll Live to Regret This by turgid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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  13. Re:This might just be a good thing by darkov · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  14. Re:you know -- the current generation still rule by pesc · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    )9TSS
  15. Don't cry over split milk by ites · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

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  16. Re:This might just be a good thing by uncleFester · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, this is a case of money and influence over technology.

    No, I think this is a case of poor marketing. It's a superior product, so much so the competetion even bought into it.. but the product was saddled with two companies who couldn't market the product. Digital was notoriously poor in marketing, and when Compaq bought them it was merely a product-rounding move. Compaq, after all, made their money in Intel-based crap and Capellas never really pushed the Alpha as the strong superior product it was.

    The Alpha was a decent hardware/OS setup: I ran a number of them at my last job, supporting boxen using Oracle. The boxes were solid computers (even for older 4100-series machines!), Tru64 was fairly solid (only a tricky NFS glitch on one machine spotted a perfect record with them) and the 1 1/2 years I spent with Dec/Compaq/Tru64 was suprisingly excellent. It's a shame the companies involved pretty much killed them due to stupidity.

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    -'fester
  17. Re:This might just be a good thing by scaprallion · · Score: 5, Funny

    I recall a conversation with a Digital rep a few years back where he claimed his company would've marketed fried chicken as "warm dead bird". I have to agree. The Alpha was a *great* architecture that never went anywhere due to lack of marketing.

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