Alpha Lives! But Who Will Market It?

chriton writes "The Inquirer is running articles about HP's and new "Marvel" server which will arrive Tuesday, Jan 14th and the expectation that HP will try to keep it's performance quiet. Not because it's bad like Itanic I, but because it's too good! It's built on Alpha EV78 processors connected by a switched fabric and promises blazing performance. "Marvel has, apparently some rollickingly good benchmarks that HP wants to underplay, just in case people start comparing the performance of the Alpha Marvel architecture with the Itanium 2 it also sells, and perhaps more importantly, the SuperDome machines." Alpha offers the kind of choice and competition the processor market will sorely miss when it goes. The FTC was sleeping when they allowed HP to acquire it."

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[Amsterdam Vallon]

I see an HP icon, an AOL icon, and a Linux penguin, and lots of positive minded talk.

It's not 1999 anymore, people. HP is a has-been, AOL is slowly finishing off their downspiral into the toilet of the ISP world, and "Linux" is as taboo for a businessman to say as "fire" is in a movie theater.

Alpha speed history?

[irritating environme]

Anyone got any measurements on the last publicly tested Alpha?

And while we're at it, back in the days of Comp Sci undergrad circa 1993 or 1994 and 66MHz 486s, there was a prototype Alpha running at 333Mhz, a jaw-dropping figure at the time. I doubt Intel even had a 150Mhz prototype at the time.

Pure RISC processors should be able to run at high megahertz advantages since their simplified instruction set lacks a microcode decode step and doesn't have quite as many multicycle instructions, should be able to more easily do branch prediction, etc. But at some point RISC MHz fell well behind the CISC behemoths of AMD and Intel. Anyone know why this really isn't the case anymore?

Yes, I *KNOW* MHz doesn't necessarily mean faster, read the fact I'm a CS major above. But my question is why the simplified architectures of RISC chips no longer produce a brute MHz advantage over the CISC chips. I didn't get an answer for this last time in the MIPS story(the moronic moderator Trolled me, my only troll on my record).