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Alpha's Going Going Gone
WildCode writes "Get your Alphas now cause HP is releasing the last of the Alphas (the final one expected to be released in 2004), and there will be no more." I was already under the mistaken impression that Alpha was dead, so this story is rather bittersweet for me. Still, as far as architectures go, Alpha will probably be among my favorites. It was once vastly ahead of its time, if not severely cost-prohibitive.
(But not sexy devil horns like the BSD chick. Carly is an evil bitch, not a hot booth babe.)
So long, Alpha. You'll always be in my heart.
...Its significance changes in the light of newer 64-bit platforms (athlon64, Itanium (sic), PPC G5). Of course, in its time, it was quite something, but that time may have passed--64-bit almost certainly will be mainstream, and will be commoditised in a few years.
yours ever, fz.
at least some good parts of it live on in AMD bus design.
I'm sorry, I just can't put my support behind a server that doesn't have stupid rhyming commericials for it.
Are Alphas "utterly buyable, give 'em a tryable"?
I think not.
Hi
Hewlett-Packard plans on Monday to begin selling the last and most powerful model in the AlphaServer line, a series of servers that stretches back to a very different era in the computing industry.
The 64-processor AlphaServer uses EV7 processors, the company said Friday. Previously, the top-end system was the 32-processor GS1280, released in July.
The 64-processor model will be the last in the AlphaServer line, an HP representative said. However, HP plans to update it with a faster processor in 2004, the EV79, which the company said would be the final processor in the Alpha family.
The AlphaServer line began at Digital Equipment and outlasted that company's 1998 acquisition by Compaq Computer. Compaq, though, decided to phase out the Alpha processor, adopting instead Intel's Itanium processor family.
Alpha was respected for its speed, but the chip never caught on widely, despite temporary support from powerful allies, including Microsoft. It competed with chips from HP, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Intel.
HP took over the AlphaServer line when it acquired Compaq in 2002.
One major feature of the AlphaServer line will live on: the OpenVMS operating system. That software, born more than 25 years ago as VMS (Virtual Memory System), is being moved to the Itanium processor.
Another operating system that runs on Alpha, the Tru64 version of Unix that also came from Digital Equipment, is being phased out in favor of HP-UX. HP engineers are working to bring some features of Tru64 to HP-UX, however.
HP plans to announce improvements to Tru64 and OpenVMS on Monday. The company will also release a new entry-level AlphaServer that uses the EV7 processor, the company said.
Ah, never mind.
I was already under the mistaken impression that Alpha was dead...
Isn't that what people around here say about BSD? ;-)
Now HP can afford to buy some more private jets for their execs to fly around in.
70,000,000 USD for 2 GS5's. Shows what they REALLY care about.
I thought that HP/CPQ was going to release an EV8 based machine .. and which company is it that has the rights to continue the alpha line(if there is one)?
I dunno, the server on my floor seems to be chugging away nicely with Debian.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Please, DO NOT SPREAD FUD!
:)
IANAL( and guess you should be getting more knowledgeable lawyers soon ), but:
- Modifications to Linux's (the kernel) source code are to be openly available if you are to distribute it. For your own use, you already have it
- Code compiled with GCC is as free or as propietary as you want.
- Code linked against libraries covered by LGPL (GNU's Lesser Public License) can be closed source. You only need to make it open if you link against GPL-only libs.
- Having software covered by the GPL (except for the Kernel work, none of your code needs to be put under the GPL) does not spoil your chances of making money from it, it just makes you rethink a bit your bussiness model ( read: get paid for services and support not for the program itself )
Hmm... "Shared Source" fair?? Does M$ Corp have you in their payroll? Go away!
and putting their money on Linux. and with this new2.6.x kernel it is just simply more cost effective, more scaleable, more reliable...
Oh, BTW, you're going to get modded into oblivion, since you are both offtopic and slamming Linux, but you knew that.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The message you replied to is quite clearly a troll. Ignore him.
Please, DO NOT SPREAD FUD!
:)
IANAL( and guess you should be getting more knowledgeable lawyers soon ), but:
- Modifications to Linux's (the kernel) source code are to be openly available if you are to distribute it. For your own use, you already have it
- Code compiled with GCC is as free or as propietary as you want.
- Code linked against libraries covered by LGPL (GNU's Lesser Public License) can be closed source. You only need to make it open if you link against GPL-only libs.
- Having software covered by the GPL (except for the Kernel work, none of your code needs to be put under the GPL) does not spoil your chances of making money from it, it just makes you rethink a bit your bussiness model ( read: get paid for services and support not for the program itself )
Hmm... "Shared Source" fair?? Does M$ Corp have you in their payroll? Go away!
They've been producing CPUs and doing development of these processors for maybe 5 years now. What's happening with that?
What was the best about Alpha in its time comparing to SPARC, RS6K, HPPA and SGI of the same price? Had it the fastest speed between CPU and RAM? Had it the fastest system bus? Had the fastest float operations? Integer ones? How about TPC? Please advise. If it is dying then we should remember good technological lessons about it, not only bad management decisions.
Less is more !
You just can't beat the economics of many cheap x86 boxes running some free OS. I think all the major players will eventually learn this, if they haven't already. And Google is the argument that you can just beat people down with. One of the most highly resilient, scalable, intensive solutions around today.
Get your own free personal location tracker
that the Alpha is being put out to pasture. This is one amazing chip and it was at one time lightyears ahead of anything Intel put out. I honestly believe that HP is making a mistake here by ditching this chip. Sure R&D costs of chip design and production are enormous but HP is hitching their wagon to the Itanic? At least use AMD and their good processors, especially the encouraging new 64 bit chip. The Itanium is about to truly become the laughstock of the microprocessor world.
If HP (and before Compaq and before them DEC) had played their cards right, the Alpha could have been a major player and taken on Intel seriously. About the only thing Intel has going for them is their ability to produce chips cheaply because of the sheer numbers. We can argue the merits of Xeon and other P4 derivatives another time but it is just a real disappointment that HP is doing this.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
~~~
Alpha is a walking body bag.
I haven't looked at Alpha specs in ages, but what impressed me most about it when it first came out was the nice simple clean, you might even call it elegant, design. In particular, I remember the instruction set being a breath of fresh air, logical and simple, and that spoke to me of a good basic design, one that would age well. They started with the proverbial clean sheet and made good choices.
But it's been way too long since I looked at one, I don't know how the current designs stack up.
Infuriate left and right
Along those lines it's interesting to note that the Mandrake 9.2 PowerPack and ProSuite come with the Intel compiler.
KFG
I will always look back fondly on days sitting at my beowulf cluster of Alpha's looking at pictures of Natalie Portman petrified with hot grits in my pants...
Like that Georgy woman who "ran" for Governor in California, this one's another plain looking geek girl that guys that don't seem to get out enough wet their pants over.
Pale, dull and overly long hair, a very boyish figure, and a very plain face. I guess she's better than some of the fat goth chicks with bad complexions, but she's not terribly pretty either.
Sorry, you can have her.
No, it wasn't a mistaken impression at all... Alpha died about 1997, when Compaq bought DEC, and squandered the assets of a great company. Sure, they were still turning out machines, but the Alpha was as good as dead from that point on. I figured maybe HP would know what Compaq didn't, and resurect the Alpha, but they are beholden to Intel, so that didn't happen.
Believe it or not, even though it's been dead for the past 6 years, it could still be resurected...
For one, Intel has bought the rights the the Alpha, so they could use some of the same ideas in their Itanium and Pentium chips. The miserable failure of the Itanium is quite encouraging, because that could mean the only way they can get a leg-up on AMD64, would be to start making Alphas... It's wishful thinking on my part, but Intel would have much to gain.
Long-live the Alpha.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Now HP can afford to buy some more private jets for their execs to fly around in.
70,000,000 USD for 2 GS5's. Shows what they REALLY care about.
Thank you, that gave me something to smile about today. (People who are fed up of the "Holy War/What is it with you Mac Fanatics?" troll who read this in the three seconds it takes to be modded down, might want to click on the "Parent" link below.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way (specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system)
See here for HOWTO on Linux Token Ring, and here for a discussion of why ext2 filesystems don't really need defragging. Oh, and report to the CEO of each company you consult for, requesting to be fired for being a pig-ignorant moron; I found these examples from 2 minutes on Google.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
- Code compiled with GCC is as free or as propietary as you want.
Actually, about six years ago we had our IP lawyers read the GPL and they felt the language was sufficiently vague in regards to GCC, that the interpretation that all code compiled with GCC should be GPL'ed couldn't be discounted.
We still went ahead and used GCC, though, since we decided the chances of a lawsuit were too small.
One major feature of the AlphaServer line will live on: the OpenVMS operating system. That software, born more than 25 years ago as VMS (Virtual Memory System), is being moved to the Itanium processor.
But who cares? Maybe only legacy users. Without binary compatibility, how many people are going to buy in again.
He was modded into oblivion for posting a standard troll, not for slamming Linux. But I hope you knew that. ;)
Good thing we are switching our Alpha server (running Tru64) over to x86 running Linux. The head of the test cell was worried about the hardware breaking and not being able to replace it
This is a good opportunity for me to try to get rid of my old alpha XL 266'es. Free to good home to anyone in the southeastern Mass area who wants to come pick them up.
I had two of them running, the third was basically spare parts. Two booted Redhat 6.0 (might have been 6.2) and were running PostgreSQL quite happily. Specs? um... beyond the fact that they are 266 MHz Alphas, I have basically no idea on memory or hard drive space.
If you're interested, email me at ghuntress at com cast dot net and I'll make the effort to go into my basement and dig them out of the boneyard and get better specs....other than that, they are bound for the landfill eventually.
Last month I threw three various Apollo 9000/735 series workstations in the trash. I believe they were introduced in the mid 90's. Two of them still booted and ran but not worth the space they consumed in my "junk" pile. They go for about $20 on Ebay but the shipping costs makes it almost worthless.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Suppose I wanted to buy a single-processor Alpha 67 or 7 or 79 motherboard or box. Can anybody post what would be the lowest price? HP makes it pretty hard to look up. TIA.
Some Alpha FAQs: Alpha powered machines still are used to validate every pentium that comes off the production line. Intel was sued by DEC for using Alpha technology in their chips. Then after the Compaq aquisition most of the Alpha devleopment team went to Intel. After the HP aquisistion the Alpha became became the red headed step child times 2. After all, a 5 year old alpha processors was STILL kicking the brand new super domes butt. Can't have that! Microsoft was sued by DEC because the creator of the original NT kernel used DEC VMS internals! The deal that was worked out is why Alpha NT existed (and Alpha 2000). Microsoft learned a lot about making a 64 bit OS from it's Alpha experience. Samsung will still sell Alphas for a bit. Many see the next step in 64 bit Intel Chips as the EV8 come to life - with Intel spin. The Alpha experience has had a tremendous influence on the computing world. Even though it is little recgonized, it's influence in chip design (but not marketing) will be felt for some time to come.
Hopefully now, VMS can die.
While Alpha may be dead, many of its technologies, such as Hypertransport, will live on.
Dead computer projects are like organ donors, in that pieces of them will live on.
I love my Alpha!
I acquired it when a previous employer did a massive house cleaning. Anything not obviously non-Intel was givin a DOS floppy to boot off of. If it failed, it was dumpster fodder.
Rescued from the trash, my Alpha has been "beauty, eh" for me for 3.5+ years. Initially I ran RedHat on it (which was ok), then upgraded to FreeBSD.
My only reboots/downtime has been due to power outrages, hardware expansion, and kernel upgrades.
I've added an ATA-100 controller, slapped in a SoundBlaster, and have USB and FireWire as well.
The box is a tank. Intel will be hard pressed to match it.
Cheers!
As much as I hate feeding trolls, I wanted to thank you for your clueless post. It made my morning.
What's the deal with Window's people always defragging disks. It's an utter waste of time. A day later the disks are fragmented again. Hell, I gave up that fruitless exercise over a dozen years ago. And Linux filesystems don't require defragmentation. At least that's my experience in the 8-9 years I've been running Linux. I've never encountered a filesystem whose performance seemed to be improved by more that a couple of percent following a backup/delete/restore. (One exception was a MUMPS database that had some files scattered across nearly 6000 extents -- a condition caused by a spectacularly uninformed system manager who thought that breaking and reestablishing mirrors (for nightly backups) automatically defragmented disks.) Have you really seen e2fsck report more than a tiny percentage of files being fragmented? Save yourself the time. Unless you like bilking your clients by billing them for some ``defragmentation service''.
And token ring? The world was giving up on token ring about the same time 8-inch floppies were going by the wayside. If you're looking to increase your consulting firm's revenues and get your client out of the paleolithic age of networking, advise them to begin replacing that and begin using commodity networking gear. Unless, of course, you prefer holding your client(s) back by using a technology that fewer and fewer consulting firms will have any expertise in. Is this your company's way of holding clients captive? And there is token ring support in Linux. If you'd bothered to look. (Hint: check the files under /usr/src/linux*/Documentation/networking.)
The above comments point out a major, major problem: You need to get new lawyers. There is nothing in the GPL that forces you to release source code if you are not distributing the code outside the company as you stated:
Finally, I'd like to thank you for the following:
Again, thanks. I had a really tough day at work yesterday and was afraid that my spirits would still be down today. But your post made me laugh so hard that now my sides hurt.
Oh how I wish you'd had the guts to include your name and the name of the so-called consulting company that you work for. That way others would know to keep you off their preferred vendor lists.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You only need to make it open if you link against GPL-only libs.
Show me the definitive list of GPL'ed Libraries. Is stdio.h GPL'ed or LGPL'ed? Is math.h GPL'ed or LGPL'ed? Is stl.h GPL'ed or LGPL'ed?
And your list must be definitive, i.e. it has to hold up under cross examination.
The "Intel Inside" TV ads, and other media blasts about Intal has convinced those who make the purchasing decisions that there is only one CPU worth anything. The CxO's have been seduced by the ads (sublimal suggestions?). The fact that Intel does NOT have the best chip architecture does not matter. Intel can supply 64-bit CPUs to HP cheaper than HP can make the Aplha and that marks the last days of the Alpha. Why make something no one wants at a cost higher than you can buy a similar product? It's good business sense, but I hate to see good technology ideas die just because they are not mainstream. Intel has a lot of power in the CPU market and they can make you an offer you can't refuse if you want to stay competitive.
Does anyone know which Alpha machines can actually run OpenVMS? I have searched for this information on the 'net and in the VMS faq, but I can't find a conclusive list of what will and won't run it.
If your vendor dies, you can just move applications to a new platform and the users will not notice a difference. With native code, good luck if the company is still alive. Even with open source, recompile will expose all kind of bugs.
Still, as far as architectures go, Alpha will probably be among my favorites. It was once vastly ahead of its time, if not severely cost-prohibitive.
Strong ARM are actually a cross between ARMs and Alphas, so what made them so special is everywhere : in the Zaurus, in some telephones, in Palms...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
A match made in heaven:
BSD, meet Alpha
Alpha, meet BSD
Quick, someone port one of the *BSD's to this new Alpha system, so that they can hold hands as they die gracefully in the next couple of years.
BSD & Alpha for ever!!! Dying!
yo Hagrid! chill out now ;-)
and blast a load off after seeing that one. Sweet.
Having worked on Alphas (and VAXs for that matter) in my previous job for six years, I have to say good-bye to an old friend. It was, for me, an incredibly powerful platform that did so many data oriented tasks so easily. The multitasking performance was amazing. We, for the longest time, ran on a VAX that was the equivalent to about a 486-120 MHz machine that could handle thirty developers. At the same time, it could handle thirty clients running reports. In general, we didn't notice each other. The Alphas put that system to shame. I often had to remember that I was working with multi-gigbyte files and processing them in seconds, not hours like on a PC. But, I suspose we'll have to use the "future" of PC hardware until it eventually catches up to the past.. =)
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Symbolics ported their Lisp Machines' operating system to the Alpha. Called Open Genera, it was almost entirely written in Lisp. Unfortunately they used Alpha microcode when porting it, and Genera depends on Tru64 unix on the host machine. I believe the code for Open Genera is in some sort of legal limbo now- its a shame, because this is sort of the final nail in the coffin for Lisp OSs. Even the ghost of the Lisp Machine has been killed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
That's what we called them when I worked at DIGITAL (up until Compaq canned a lot of people right after the purchase and almost killed the Alpha then).
They are still ahead of their time. The fastest Alpha's (EV8, over 1GHz) were still far faster than an equivalent speed x86 processor.
I've heard repeatedly that Samsung will still be producing the processors. I have not looked into this recently though.
It's a shame to lose such a great architecture. Yet another example of the best ideas not always being the most popular or surviving. At least part of the architecture will live on in AMD chips (for now at least).
PGA
Why would you be surprised that HP is throwing their weight behind it? Also, Alpha technology has been trickling into Intel processors for years.
Yes, the biggest things Intel has going for it is fab capacity, economies of scale, and the natural trend toward commodization. Of course, that is a tough hand to beat. Intel is also famous for superior management and some of the best quality control processes in the world. Companies like AMD aspire to have quality control like Intel.
It seems like HP has the knack for making some really cool products for niche markets, and then saying ``Revenue from massive niche sales? We don't want none of that! Here, buy a piece of plastic made for what we think is the mainstream''. Perfect examples are things like the HP16c and HP32SII calculators. The HP16C calculator they outright cut, despite the economics of it would have allowed them selling just a small number for high prices. The 32SII they've marginally cut: you don't see it on their website, but at some stores you can still buy it. HP sales say they'll have a replacement model out for it in a year or so.
I want them! Chris Daniels from Arlington will email you!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
My sister's XP laptop using fat32 slowed to a crashing crawl until the disk was defragged and she learned she needed to do this once a week for hygiene. Ext2 say whatever you like about it compared to reiserfs or XFS or ext3-- the filesystem never needs defragging and it seems to work just about as well at 99% partition fullness as at 5%. Fat32 at 99% full is a constant nightmare.
If crt1.c (or other parts of the GCC-specific runtime library) WERE under GPL, it is possible that it may render every userland program compiled with GCC under the GPL (unless the code is too short to be copyrighted :). HOWEVER, most of these run-time support files are under looser licenses than GPL (for example, GPL with linking exception), so the former probably don't apply. If you have lawyers and want to be careful, just download GCC source and read the license of every file that has some remote probability to make your software a derivative work of it.
If typing in long point-by-point rebuttals of obvious trolls is fun for you, then you have even more severe mental problems than the troller.
a multia if i recall. I had one in my trunk in the late 90s playing mp3s. Sweet little box, I still have it but it hasn't been powered on in ages.
from the do not go gently into that GOOD night dept.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
---Dylan Thomas
Intel has already announced that the Alpha design team that it hired intact from HP is working on the "Tanglewood" Itanium version due in 2006
Its too bad that HPAQ sold the rights to the Alpha design to Intel. Imagine the fantastic impact if the Alpha VDHL and Synopsis designs blueprints were open sourced. How many silicon fab plants would take a shot at cranking out high-speed, optimized Alphas?
;-)
It's really too bad that IBM didn't buy them if for no other reason than to hop up the already super powerful Power2 processor series.
And then open source it
Another thing would be nice is if VIA or the motherboard manufacturers would find a way to allow multiple CPU architectures to run on those motherboards.
Then you just pick the motherboard, pick the CPU, install the correct version of linux and run.
Linux wasn't a real factor back then and DEC never really got behind the Linux on Alpha anyway.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
You know, this is amazing......
:)
There are absolutely *NO* "Alpha is dying" trolls in this topic.
Now *that* is a sign of the coming apocalypse.
Your solution is to tell the client to replace their networking infrastructure? Gee, customers must love you. I know my clients love it when I tell them they have to make big hardware purchases to replace something that's already working fine for them, especially when they hired me to solve a software problem.
You should go into car repair...can't figure out how to fix the transmission? No problem, just replace the whole engine.
According to all the Compaq/HP rep's that come to our place the Intel Itanium 2 processor and future 64-bit Intel chip are in large part Alpha code. That the lawsuit of a few years back with Intel and DEC resulted in Intel getting rights to the Alpha technology and they started rolling the Alpha code in with the Itanium 2 chip. That's the smack the Compaq/HP droids are spewing.
Ok, it is wishful thinking, but wouldn't it be damned nice to have a high performance royalty free 64 compiler friendly CPU core, as a hedge against the onslaught of "trusted computing"?
My rights don't need management.
Alphas weren't inherently expensive. Most were good servers and workstations, with special internal busses and memory interconnection; you paid for the whole system. The personal systems, such as the PWs, Multias and the clones, were actually good value and price.
By the time MS killed the MS-WNT port, and Compaq took over, there was a notebook part in the works, and the Samsung clones would help it gain volume and lower prices... Intel managed to kill everything just in time to avoid being trampled by superior tech.
And that brings the major limitation to market efficiency nowadays: lack of information of the market participants. Most people just believed Wintel FUD.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Interesting points. What is the connection to the Alpha chip? Staying on topic is important for constructive conversations.
I'm writing this at home on one of my two Linux/Alphas.
My first contact with one was in 1997, when I was working in Lincoln Laboratory. I bought two (for $30K!) to do a hero experiment. Put Linux on them, played with TCP parameters, and got a sustained 1 Gb/s TCP/IP session between them over an 850-km optical link. Back then, it was a world record. We tried it with a Sun server. Couldn't get the 1 Gb/s. Ditto with Intels.
Six years later, that kind of performance probably wouldn't cost a thousand dollars. But to see it then was breathtaking.
I've gone on to work with many DEC engineers. They are some of the brightest people you'll ever meet. But I've heard that their marketing sucked donkey dick. If you once worked in DEC marketing, you would NEVER put that on your resume. Pricing a computer at 15 times the next competitor is insane, no matter how good it is. That's no way to own the market.
So whether I should or not, I blame the management at DEC for sinking what was a true technical achievement.
The Register reports on Itanium sales, or rather lack thereof. HP sold 3,178 Itanium servers in Q2 2003. HP is the only vendor selling Itaniums in any quantity. Total Itanium sales from IBM and Dell are something like 20 units per quarter.
Would somebody please take the Inanium off life support?
All this foofaraw over the G5 and Athlon 64 is just revisionist history. ;)
I just had an interview with these people. He explained how first they were company A then bought by B, C and finally D (intel). He latched on to the project somewhere between B and C. From what he says, the Alpha architecture is vastly superior to what they are currently working with for Itanium (EPIC). This doesn't mean much to me, but it may to someone else.
NEC released two notebooks with Alpha processors. They also had SCSI 2.5" drives - I beleive an option on one was to have 500MB flashRAM SCSI drive - that option (again if not mistaken was $4400 (in addition to the laptop) - they were mostly used by Telephone Companies and Utility/Energy companies. I know my local Duke Power line workers had a few. (My mother leases apartments to Duke Power transients - so I kept up with their technology) - Duke Power moved to Apple PowerBook Duos and currently use Panasonic Toughbooks.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
power outrages; i like that...
Original alphas where cheaper to manufacture than original pentiums, even with similar processes!
Alpha:s cost about 200$ to make while pentium:s where over 500$ a piece. They just didn't make cheap entrylevel machines, they where supposed to replace other EXPENSIVE peace of equipment like mini computers and workstations,and the management didn't really try to compete against PC:s so they died on onslaught of the killer micros.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
While these sound like having been nice systems, they weren't widely successfull because they used standard desktop Alphas. The notebook-specific version of the Alpha, geared towards low power consumption and cool running, never saw the light of the day.
I still regret not being able to buy a RISC SCSI portable.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
"About the only thing Intel has going for them is their ability to produce chips cheaply because of the sheer numbers."
Yup, and the only thing Ford had going for them was the ability to mass-produce the Model T.
The only thing Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron had going for them was the ability to hit home runs.
The only thing Einstein had going for him was the theory of relativity.
Come on!
An ode to alpha
I'm about to cry. Maybe it's just because I haven't had my antidepressants for the day yet and I'm listening to the last tracks of the Braveheart soundtrack, but I also recently had my Multia die on me and I have no idea where to get parts to fix it. So long, Alpha. We loved you.
I don't think code is exactly the term I'd use for incorporating Alpha design and technology into another product.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And that was a big part of the problem. DEC's senior management firmly believed that price/performace translated to end user prices, in spite of being told over and over that customers were not willing to pay twice as much for a system that was twice as fast. And unfortunately, they were also not willing to pay a premium for DEC's legendary reliability engineering, either.
Had DEC priced its systems appropriately, and explained the benefits of performance and reliability to the market, the Alpha would still be a serious player.
...-.-
As long as Debian lives, Alpha lives. Apt-get you something nice.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But it wasn't DEC who needed to lower prices -- the clonemakers did that.
There were other problems playing here. Volumes were never big enough for the clonemakers to get real economies of scale, since MS failed to port anything but compilers and server software. No MS VB until near the end, no full MS Office (only MS Word and Excel), no 64 bits, no optimisation, no marketing or advertisement... this last was also a DEC failure.
DEC was also a victim of its emphasis on its proprietary VMS platform, even if it eventually produced a POSIX version (OpenVMS). GNU/Linux wasn't pushed as it should, nor was Digital Unix. Alternative sources of supply for the processors were also lacking.
All this and much else the like made Alpha machines successful products without a successful architecture ecosystem around it... kind of like Apple's predicament.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Intel dropped the ball on this one VLIW processor while a good idea should not be taken so far. Instead of implementing a killer RISC platform with excellent design and programmability that could have been released fast, efficiently, quickly we have itanium a project that was slow to come out, costs far more to make than any other microprocessor, and cost more engineering than the others. Intel should have been priming a replacement for x86 in the mid 90's that they could have developed and improved over a long period of time they could have released many targeted variants and tried to unify there ISA's. Imagine if IBM had the budget of intel, what kind of commodity PPC could they have built. All I know is that x86 is the scariest thing from a design point of view and needs to die. That is why intel is hated
Here she is.
I wonder why people like not-too-mainstream or much-too-old architectures and systems. Alpha, Amiga, 8-bit Atari and C64. They all have lots of devoted lovers. :)
btw, I love my Alphastation 500 running FreeBSD
regards
-- mg
I believe that the death of Alpha is closely related to the EOLing of Windows NT, the only Microsoft operating system that runs on Alpha. If Microsoft had made ports for Alpha for Windows 2000 and 2003, there would still be demand for it. Linux kept the Alpha alive, but could not make it viable.
Then, again, Microsoft has not ported Windows 2000 for the Alpha because demand was weak - and so followed Red Hat and most commercial Linux vendors, until Debian was prety much the only Linux distro that sustained the Alpha.
Stop comparing the chip to x86. VMS shared memory clustering has nothing in common linux clusetering capabilities and none of that has anything to do with a chip architecture. Particularly an architechture supporting a solution that STILL considers TCP/IP an add-on feature you have to buy a liscense for (go multinet you sack of steaming dirt!)
Don't you dare talk to me about high 9's availability. This architecture lives on because of the fanatacism of its legacy (and often senior / purchase decision making)support staff despite the woefully poorly coded applications (and a limited selection of them) it runs which I've seen drop wildfire clusters quarterly for two years. Why are they senior? Find me a 23 year old that can walk in and poke around for a week on a variety of Galaxy, standalone VAxen, and clustered Alphas then competently administer them and do it for under $50k/yr.
The solution is a dog, has no future but that doesnt stop sales of DS-25's to this day.
The architecture of the processor has always been one of the best but as a solution it has much more in common with a Sun or IBM *nix system than anything on x86 if for nothing else than the tightness of microarchitecture interoperability that x86 will likely never truly enjoy.
The cost of porting applications to it is ridiculous given its puny install base keeping application variety and quality down. Three companies have handled this solution, if it was economically viable to put forth a third major architectual format into the market someone would have managed to do so successfully. Think about it, Microsoft support even failed to make this dog relevant.
Die already.
You have 2 propblems:
...and man... token ring? This is 2003, not 1985! Damn, man! I don't know *anybody* outside of IBM that still uses that shit. If you were doing your job you'd have them switching to gigabit ethernet, 802.11b, *anything* but token ring! Oh well, your company is going down the tubes anyway... See you in hell!
1) Your lawyers are dumber than dog shit.
2) You're dumber than your lawyers.
Linux has had token ring support for a good long while. Ext2 file systems almost *never* need to be defragmented anyway. It really is too bad that you were such a coward that you had to post anonymously. I really would have liked to know which consulting firm you work for so that I could tell everyone I know to stay away from them. Consultants are supposed to know their shit, and you, your lawyers, and your company obviously do *not*. The only customers a company like yours can get are the ones that are clueless weenies. Eventually someone is going to catch on to your scheme.
"I am somewhat close to the team at Intel that is doing this...and that is a total load of crap."
Well - that may just be too bad. Seems both HP and Intel are bound and determined to *re-learn* some of the mistakes DEC made on Alpha early on. IMHO ignoring those left in the Alpha engineering pool (and their "lessons learned") may just doom Itanium to a similar fate (no not entirely, but read on). In fact, in a week where I watched Boston blow a 3 run lead by refusing to go to the bullpen in a late inning - thus permitting the Yankees to once again come from behind and tie and eventually win another American League championship - I am reminded that thinking you don't need to learn from those that have gone before you is not a flaw restricted to the HighTech industry.
My view of all this (and I am not a chip-head by any means) is kind of simple. Once DEC sold off FAB6@Hudson to Intel and therefore became "eligible" for buyout by Compaq (nice of them, eh?), there was no hope left for Alpha. As was pointed out earlier in this thread, the Alphas stayed competitive by upping the speed versus the PA-RISC and Power chips, (which at the time were much more focused on the "brainiac" strategy discussed above). Once the DEC team lost the ability to make their own CPUs, who would make them for them? TI was trying to make faster u-SPARCs, and IBM wouldn't make a competitor's chip more competitive would they? And given Intel's desire to get everyone to believe in the Itanium myth (yes myth - has it killed off any RISC architectures yet? Just Alpha, but Intel/Compaq/HP had to do this together), they weren't going to invest in faster, better Alphas either.
But what really killed the Alphas were those floating point scores for the Merced and Itanium-IIs, once they went into actual production. Folks, CPUs are products, and the Alphas needed **some/a couple of** markets to survive. For a long time, one market was scientific computing; the other was big databases. By the time HP merged with Compaq, however, the other RISC vendors had caught up and passed the less-speedy Alphas that Compaq had actually permitted to leave the building on the commercial side, and it sure looked like Itanium-IIs were going to match or exceed the future Alphas by 2004 (if not sooner) on floating point power. More importantly, with the move of the scientific community to Linux, it was going to be very hard for the Alphas to stay viable for that market (given the number of boxen likey to be built with Itanium-II and later CPUs - it's just economies of scale). So if it was just an also-ran in the large-DBMS commercial market and likely to lose market share for the scientific market, there was no possibility of Alhpa's survival.
Of course, there are some applications (like VMS-based ones, or the TruCluster stuff that doesn't work under HP-UX just yet) that still needed EV7 and EV79 CPUs. I suppose the logic to the new announcements (previously discussed at the time of the merger, to keep from freakin' out the Alpha lovers) is HP/Intel could continue to make these as a "swan song" for Alpha, until 2005 when the current roadmaps show all the Itanium vision coming together (and running Windows, HP-UX, Linux, and VMS).
What is interesting in all this is who wins here. HP and Intel kill the Alpha line, but isn't it really "Compaq" that will sell the most Itanium servers? IF the HP server team really thinks they will keep the Compaq Server team in some Xeon-only 32-bit ghetto, guess again. And if they do, I am sure Dell is just waiting for such a short-sighted decision.
But back to those "mistakes":
(1)"The Chicken-or-Egg Problem" / Let's see - Alphas needed better compilers to be competitive; so does Itanium. Using such compilers takes experience, and you need cheap CPUs for developers so that they can work on the ports on cheaper machines. Seems like Intel *finally* got the message on this, which is why they announced all those cheap Itanium chips this past Summer (also for cheap Linux clusters).
It's not about shareholder value. It is about short term profits/exec enrichment.
They were the first to have really high clock speeds and it was a terrible abortion at first, the rest of the system was slow enough that the processor routinely stalled waiting for data. They migrated to a slightly different architecture that has a very sophisticated caching system, with the same problems, but it was a bit easier to get code in to cache, albeit an odd ball sized cache. They initially had terrible yields too. It wasn't until it was declared a dead architecture that they really got things in to a very solid position relative to Intel and IBM.
I'm a fan, but they made a lot of mistakes and never really made a push with it. It has been fun to watch but also painful; DEC was 10 years ago where Sun is today, a very talented group, with some good ideas and technology but no clear vision on how to put it out there. More over, alpha was strictly a server/desktop kind of chip that runs very hot and takes a lot of power and over the last 5 years or so that has been shown to be a losing design since people are very interested in scaling architectures, nobody wants to buy into something they can't use elsewhere and that's why powerpc goes from dinky little $10 CPUs for Tivos up to $4000 CPUs in p690s and sysplex boxes.
It also shows what may be an incredibly stupid move by HPaq. They are totally in bed with Intel with no plan B. That's too big a company to gamble on a single platform that hasn't demonstrated marketability.
Before Alpha, the DEC VAX line was beating IBM big iron for price/performance. When Alpha came out, it was priced to beat VAX on price/performance. But DEC had a problem -- the VAX revenue stream would disappear overnight if all the VAXes were replaced with Alphas. They HAD to keep the prices artificially high, because they had VAX customers perfectly willing to pay a little more for alot more power. Unfortunately, that limited the market and gave Intel a chance to survive in the low-end server and desktop market.
People forget that in the first year or two, Alphas were constrained by the price of memory. Proprietary DEC memory was the priciest of all. If you have all that raw CPU speed, you sure can't waste it on page faults! At the time, Microsoft was just starting to break the 1MB memory barrier.
It would have been a very risky move, but DEC could have decided to push VMS software at giveaway prices and commoditize Alpha. They would have destroyed both Intel and MS, leaving DEC as the industry leader. By the time they got around to doing these things, DEC was facing a huge installed base of Intel/MS low-end desktops.
When DEC produced Alpha, they failed to realize that it was an all-or-nothing proposition. They had to either go head-to-head with the entire industry all at once, or get eaten alive by the low-end competitors. The prices that were too high to increase or maintain market share were not high enough to keep DEC profitable, hence the death spiral.
Itanic 2 doesn't "blow the doors" off everything else.
Look at the spec results. For int, everything beats it. Opteron beats it. Pentium 4 Extreme Edition beats it handily.
For FP it is in the lead, but it is barely in the lead. To say it blows the doors off other things is a gross misstatement.
This is the first I've heard of this. Do you have any links to further info?
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
Samsung was going to come out with a 2000 Mhz Alpha,
what happened to that?
You don't say whether you ran Ultrix ^W Digital Unix ^W Tru64, or VMS. If it is the latter, they are planning on porting it to IA64. Lots of details at http://www.openvms.digital.com/
including which applications are being ported and which ones are being replaced (e.g. Netscape is being replaced by something Mozilla based).
I have nostalgia for VMS too but I can't say it is much more than nostalgia. Even FreeVMS (http://www.free-vms.org/ or http://www.panix.com/~kingdon/free-vms.html ) hasn't ended up being more than a handful of tools for migration/interoperability between VMS and Unix.
I felt the same. Pieces of the DEC Alpha still live on in the AMD Athlons at least.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
I, for one, wave goodbye to our CPU overlord.
I blame it on it too darned early, having woken up in a surly mood, and the morning coffee not having kicked in yet. Normally, I wouldn't have even read the original post but there were too many replies that piqued my interest in just who could be so clueless.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
No I didn't suggest a fork-lift style replacement. I said ``begin replacing'' the token ring. (I guess the subtle nuances of the English language are a bit much for some folks.) But to cross something like Linux off your list of potential solutions because it doesn't support token ring -- which is obviously false and has been for years -- would be just stupid. I've worked in environments that used both token ring and ethernet. The token ring problems were always more expensive to solve and adding something to that type of network just costs too much. Many meetings were devoted to whether the use of token ring would be continued due to its costs. (Ever priced token ring cards? There are about 20 times as many ethernet products to choose from that are about one-tenth the cost of a token ring adapter.) If you're not recommending getting rid of it over a period of time then you're doing a disservice to the client.
I assumed (yah, I know all about assuming...) that the original poster had inherited a system that already had a token ring adapter in it. And, if they'd bothered to check, they'd have been aware of the token ring support on Linux so you wouldn't have had to make the silly decision that the original poster did (unless you're that poster :-) ). Imagine what the client's view of that consultant's skills will be when they find out that the recommendation was so obviously wrong.
As for the transmission problem: I stopped working on engines once the auto manufacturers rendered my timing light useless. It's no fun any more.
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The thing to remember about the Itanic is that it has all the advantages of Intel's process technology and fab technology - the fact that it's a space heater while running on a 0.13um process indicates that there's something dodgy going on. Current Alphas are still on at least 0.18um, and with a less advanced process - it's hardly surprising that they run hot.
/have/ to be! And a large part of the reason Alpha is dead, and will stay dead, is because of IA64 and the amount of time and money invested in it by HP and Intel. So I think a certain amount of bitching about Intel and Itanium is reasonable . . .
Itanium2 has turned out to be a worthwhile processor, after far too many years of hype and far far too much money thrown at it. I think that's why so many people here and elsewhere don't like it - the hype was massive, and the end result is only now showing it's teeth performance-wise, while still suffering from various other problems.
Alpha was a relic of an earlier age in the industry, as much as DEC. But it didn't
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
VMS is actually younger than UNIX (1978 vs. 1970). And what's most importantly, most of the technologies that were added on to UNIX and other OS's were there from the start in VMS.
Access Control Lists (only became a standart part of FreeBSD in 5.x.. correct me if I'm wrong) were long a part of VMS, while clustering has existed far before Slashdot fanboys were posting about Beowulf clusters.
POSIX compatibility? Yep, exists in OpenVMS (hence the prefix Open) -- many major UNIX apps were ported to OpenVMS. X11, yep -- complete with Motif. Hell, there's a Mozilla port these days too.
As for a cluster of peecee's.. they're great when you're say rendering a part of Titanic (bad example actually, as that was done on Alpha.. but you get the idea), but a beowulf cluster is pretty useless when say you're managing a large bank, or a university's registration database: when speed isn't an issue, but fault tolerance and stability is.
The lifetime of an average PeeCee is about 3 years.. yet as I'm typing there's 20 year old VAXen still handling crucial tasks. So while it may be cheaper to do the initial purchase, there's no need to repeat the purchase cycle.
Overhyped? I see no one hyping OpenVMS, but I do see a lot of people hyping clusters of PeeCee's running Linux. Incompatible: see the first few paragraphs of my post. Expensive? Ok, you may have a point there.. but so are its competitors. You can, however, get a hobbyist license of VMS for free, if you're interested.
Artifact junk? Again, see the part of my post about clustering and ACL's.
It's fine for you to dislike VMS or criticize it, or not use it, but don't call it obsolete or incompatible, or claim that stability isn't required.
Do you have a cite? Nothing about this appears in any /. article this year for topic "Intel". I have yet to see processors or motherboards for sale at any price--is Itanium even on the market yet?
Here is top500.org's list, upto date as of 2003/06.
Everyone should take notice that an ES-class Alpha cluster is at 2nd place while the only Itanium2-type cluster to ever compare comes in at 8th place and then 35th place. The first model of Itanium doesn't even appear on the list until about 111th place! Itanium2 may be a huge step from the first Itanium, yet Top500.org clearly shows that Alpha technology is superior to Intel's Itanium. A few people in this forum are critical that Intel would start producing Alpha if the Itanium2 flops, yet I seriously doubt any Alpha workstations would be made for average availability. The only customers to receive an Alpha would be large coroporations willing to pay the high price, and I seriously doubt that Intel would want to put in the hands of customers a technology they want replaced with their in-house flop Itanium2. The purpose of Intel is to buy their competition, then the market, and raise the price. Intel doesn't want any complete computer being sold that doesn't have their brand of technology in it. Low-power technology included. I hear VIA's Nehemia architecture and Transmeta's Crusoe technology are verry good replacements if you don't like energy-sucking Athlon and Itanium, but there is a limit to how low power you can go with seriously suffering performance.
Secured Party, Without Prejudice, UCC 1-207: Creditor
Alcoa for instnace runs all their rolling mill controls systems on a Alpha based platform doing realtime control using very specalised fortran libaraies they have spent decades developing. They need spares for the life of the rolling mill system that have installed to date.
They offered to sell me the old Alpha boxes for $450 a piece for the Quad 350's and $750 for the quad 500's. I just blew the $5000 I had saved up for a new Dual G5 on 5 quad Alpha 500 boxes and 6 Quad 350's. I think I am going to Ebay 4 of the 350's and 2 of the 500's see if I can recoop some of the money I spent. My fiance loved the fact that I used like $2500 of the wedding fund to buy these.
Its a shame compaq screwed with the pricing structure. Back in Febuary we did a rendering test between a new Dell Dual 2Ghz Xeon box with 2GB ram (is the office file/print server but "burned it in for 48 hours" - means we played with it for a couple days before acutlly hooking it into the network) and the Alpha STILL beat its rendering time by 12%. Granted our rendering software was highly optimized (aka cost a small fortune) for the Alpha platform, but still.
We looked at getting new Alpha boxes, but the cost and the fact we were frankly told by the HP rep that Alpha's days were numbered caused us to look between IBM and SUN. With the company switching its 3D graphics/animation division to Maya on Linux, IBM won out.
I have 3 of the boxes I bought running on FreeBSD 5 now. I will keep these box to shine as an enternal flame...at least until my fiance makes me sell 'em.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Why will this be a revolution?
1. Because 64 bit micro processors are just around the corner.
2. There will be a huge market for real time digital video applications using cheap 64 bit tech.
3. Microsoft is right about the integration of the home entertainement possibilities, even though they have their head up their ass.
4. The Chinese will learn from our mistakes in deliberately not letting 64 bit processing into the main stream, eg; digital vid recorders, 24/96 audio recording.
In short I think the Chinese will take on Creative, HP, Intel and Microsoft and beat them the same way Toyota did with cars in the 70s and Hyundai did with heavies (ships, and marine engines). By alowing the entertainment industry in North America to dictate the pace of adoption of digital video and music recording and tech we are dropping the ball big time. HP and Intel will self destruct because of this. Microsoft will survive only because they could care less who builds the hardware as long as they can make a cut!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Info here.
First boot was on Jan. 31. An Alpha/IA64 cluster was running by May. Early versions of OpenVMS v8 for IA64 systems have been released to select ISVs...
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
I've heard some saying that the victors are the one who get to rewrite history. BTW I've got a dual G5 here at home and two Alpha servers sittig on the floor (not currently being used) at work. I intend to do something with the Alphas some day... Linux server perhaps? I'm just hoping that IBM is able to scale the PPC970 as fast or faster than they have stated. Intel needs someone to keep them on their toes. :)
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
I've got a dual G5 right here too, but no Alphas. :(
The PowerBook Duo 2300 withe 603e and SCSI hard drive was a RISC SCSI portable.
As I remember the machines that the Duke power workers had were lightening fast, even as compared to today's machines.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Once upon a time the alpha was on my Wishlist Of Things I Will Never Be Able To Afford. Now that I could afford it, it's no longer there.
Another childhood dream gone...
The Alpha was extremely hard to install because of the rarity of precompiled internet downloads for it and the lack of optimization in gcc. Once you tracked down the packages and got things ported to Compaq C it was far superior to any Intel chip.