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End Of The Line For Alpha
Scareduck writes "Infoworld reports HP has released the last iteration of the Alpha chip. I used these babies in the late 90's, and for a time, they were da bomb. Sadly, the economics weren't there, DEC management really didn't have much of a clue, and Alpha has, at long last, bit the dust. Alpha-based servers will continue to be sold through 2006, and supported through 2011. Farewell, Alpha; the world's line of chips seems to have declined to Intel and a handful of niche guys." Slashdot ran for the first 7 or 8 months off an Alpha box.
to "Omega" then?
I for one, welcome our new Intel overlords
Business Voyeur
Damn, sure took them a while to get to Beta...
one of the "X is Dead" comments can be true!
It's truly scary how the Intel is becoming the only mainstream chip architecture left alive. Pretty good for something that intel originally created as a stopgap solution! I'm just hoping that UltraSparcs don't go anywhere.
BTW, better colors.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Goodbye Alpha, I barely knew ya... I remember at Fermilab when we got our first batch of Alpha powered Vaxes how wicked fast they were. And I think Altavista was running on Alphas in those days too.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
interesting . . . doesn't seem that way to me
harmonious design
Isn't this the fourth or fifth time Alpha has died? Let it rest already!
Zombie Alpha needs brains, badly.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Yeah, like that little known outfit called AMD. I know you might not of heard of them, but they do make some good chips ;) :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
"Pricing for the ES47 and ES80 systems with the new 1.15GHz EV7 will start at $29,200 and $49,300, respectively."
Holy crap! And here I was, thinking that the Xeon servers were expensive!
I suppose this should put a steak in the heart of OpenVMS, and now we can say VMS is dead now also? That will be at least one positive result of this.
"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." - Revelations 22:13.
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
Does AMD count as one of the "niche guys"? Granted, they're not as big as Intel but I've always thought of them as the chip to buy when you don't want to buy Intel.
I wouldn't say I'm a bad gambler but the last time I went to Vegas I even lost a buck on the soda machine.
what about IBM's powerPC ???
harmonious design
I can't see this bringing in much revenue. If I was a company currently using Alpha, it seems like a dead-end choice to buy yet another Alpha-based machine, knowing this was the last one. Seems like a better decision to migrate away now, rather than just prolong it. ;)
Of course, that's just my opinion, and business decisions rarely make much sense
And here I thought Alpha had been dead for years... maybe it was just the impression DEC gave. Perhaps this is a lesson in self-fulfilling prophecy.
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
*sniff*
*sob*
Oh, this is just too much for me to handle. The greatest Quake platform is dead.
Good bye, cruel world!
Really, tho, this is a shame. Alpha procs are (*sob* were *sob*) the fastest thing a mortal could get. Ignoring compile problems, I'd take an Alpha over an x86 or PPC any day.
Back when Quake2 was the latest id title, I set up a dedicated server on my alpha box (a tiny multia). My roommate and I were amazed -- gameplay was glass -- it was actually better than running on an x86 dedicated server and better than running against a local server (same box). Could not believe it. It was so smooth.
Sorry, I'm going to go get drunk cry a lot (I'm working on solaris today, and I just can't take all the pain).
Go pick on Realplayer today, apple zealots !!!
Anyone use freeshell? My mail account is a freeshell account.
*
As far as I know their (Unix) cluster is Alpha 64 based. Guess they'll have to switch..
I'd say the PowerPC is a pretty mainstream architecture, considering how it shows up in everything from workstations to Power Macs to Cisco routers. Also -- sad, maybe, but scary? PC computers are kind of a niche market compared to all of the embedded applications out there. So what if it's all based on old Intel ideas, so long as you've got folks like AMD and Transmeta to keep pushing the envelope?
Breakfast served all day!
I run a very busy mail server running FreeBSD on a "COMPAQ" Dual Alpha 500
its still qucik to this day
I'm no fanboy, but AMD is more than just a niche guy.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Here's the article about the alpha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
I was talking with CmdrTaco and Keith Packard along wtih a few of the other XFree86 people. They were all going on about heating the bedrooms with Alphas in the winter. And telling other Alpha related stories. Then Keith looks at me and asked if I have an Alpha. I never felt so inadequate as a geek. So a couple months later I did pick up a dual 21164 (EV56) based machine. Sure enough it did keep my bedroom warm, that is when it wasn't tripping the circut breaker. So I moved it to the server room at work, where it sits now still hosting my websites.
Does Netcraft confirm it?
Another one bites the dust
I'd hardly call Intel the biggest CPU architecture out there.... maybe for PCs.
ARM comes to mind. what about the embedded market? Atmel's AVRs, Microchip PICs, Motorola HC08's,HC11's, there's billions of non-intel architecture CPUs shipped every year. To those guys, intel is just a niche player....
[flame suit off]
My first exposure to Linux was with an Alpha box. A friend of mine had bought a Multia to run as a server for his network. This was just at the time that MP3 was starting to show up (late '95), and he decided to run Linux on it, giving me the grand tour. Because of this, I toyed with Slackware a bit, but since I didn't have enough disk space at the time, I dropped it for a while. A couple of years later, I came into two Multia's by chance, and, remembering the old experience, bought them and installed Linux on them. I've since moved to a full time Linux user, both at home, and at work, and I have DEC/digital to thank for it.
So long, Alpha, we'll miss you...
hmmmmmmmmmmm.....
lessee, we have the powerPC by IBM, used both in their own machines and in apple hardware. We have the sparc machines by sun (which may or may not exist for much longer). We have AMD, which is becoming more and more mainstream, perhaps the biggest competitor intel has had in a long time. Oh and we forgot one other thing... how about all the chips that go into devices like phones and PDAs. You know, the motorola chips and such. For that matter, what about GPUs on graphics cards?
seems like there are a long more processors out there than the article says, dont you think?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Finally, Transmeta's closest competitor is gone. Oh, wait... nuts...
Just had a prof that i know spend a good deal of money to have Gentoo put on his alphas. He simply is in love with them and just won't let them go. Admittedly, he's an older, British guy studying 12th century Chinese music (no, that is not a joke) and codes *everything* in lisp (the mere mention of anything other than emacs will launch a long, but very well defended argument). He even had his wife's computer done too (she's a heavy alpha user and prof too).
:(
i'm not sure what the point of this is, other than to say, there are still people who love and use alphas for some very important work (not that i'm waiting for 12th century chinese tunes to save the world, but you know what i'm saying). It's still sad to see something that was once great kinda wander off into non-production
Before there was Intel x86 (comptabile) and a number of niche processors, and now there's still Intel and a number of niche processors. The submitter's closing statement seems a tad alarmist.
We still have Itanium, two Sparc variants, a number of Power variants, Transmeta, Opteron, and whole bunch of other niche processors, most of which probably have more market share than alpha.
Slashdot ran for the first 7 or 8 months off an Alpha box.
If memory serves, Slashdot ran on a Multia.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
they get to at least Epsilon.
We didn't have any of this fancy-pants CPU-on-a-chip stuff. We built our computers by hand. 74xx TTL IC chips wirewrapped together. And by god we LIKED it.
I'll take a steak in my stomach any time over a steak in the heart. How would you get a steak in the heart of something, anyhow? It's too soft to penetrate (unlike, say, a STAKE).
IIRC, AMD licensed the Alpha memory bus design and it's still used today. It's how AMD ended up with such a fast bus and beat Intel for ~2 years with a faster FSB.
So, if you run and AMD CPU then you're keeping the DEC Alpha technology alive. Also, don't forget that the DEC StrongARM was part of the DEC technical vision too. It's how Intel got into the handheld market. Too bad DEC thought Microsoft was it's future....
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
In the early 90s, there was this hot debate about RISC vs. CISC, and the merits of each, ...etc.
This has all died out now, with CISC (read: Intel) coming out as a winner.
Regarding the number of chips out there, AMD is not really different from Intel, at least it is instruction set compatible. Maybe this will change a bit in the 64-bit versions, but not right now. PowerPC is a good architecture, but not so wide spread. Outside of some IBM servers, and the 3% that is Apple's share, they are not used much.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I'm running The Proxomitron, and I simply added a new filter that replaces "it . slashdot . org" with "slashdot.org" (munging required because the filter affects my preview!) So it took me a little while to figure out what your "better colors" meant, as I already had them.
John
every week, since 1990, we got an article just like that. alpha is dead. PERIOD.
the only two alpha i had to administer in my life, one was slow as a DEAD COW and the other was stable as a DEAD COW (i think it was some trouble with the power unit, but the support from digital cost more then 12 brand new dell machines).
Farewell, Alpha; the world's line of chips seems to have declined to Intel and a handful of niche guys."
You mean small players like IBM? I guess the G5 and Power line of chips are not really big time enough to worry about?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
have som epretty neat processors.
I have no laptop, but my first one will be VIA based!
Alpha lives on (at least in spirit) within AMD; They hired some of the engineers and licensed some of the technology, the EV6 bus being a prime example. Exactly how many and how much we don't know (for obvious business reasons.)
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Taking potshots like this at x86 chips is such bullshit. So what if it's not as optimal an architecture as the Alpha, or if the EV7 bus is pretty neat? The biggest advantage of using x86 systems over anything else isn't that they're the fastest chips, cycle-for-cycle, or that they're a particularly elegant solution. It's that they're CHEAP and FAST ENOUGH.
Think about how many Intel Xeons you could get, on 9xx chipset mobos, for $30,000. If you built them yourself, probably 15-20. Is one (or four) 1.5 GHz Alphas are more useful than a cluster of 20 Xeons? Hell no!
See, ever since Intel lost their de facto monopoly on powerful x86 chips (thank you, AMD!), their prices have dropped far enough that it's hard to beat x86 solutions on a price vs. performance basis. Even if you have to stack up more boxes in a rack to do it. Hell, Quad-CPU Xeons can still go for less than $6,000, if you build them from parts, so rackspace isn't really an issue.
This comment from an Engineering conference call from Dec West site to Colorado got the well deserved applause and laughter when the DEC/Compaq merger was announced. I was there when it happened, and this got to the main problem with DEC: couldn't market a whore in a free port. They sat on the Alpha design for years as it was before launch in part because they didn't want to eat into thier mini business the way they ate into mainframe business. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes. Sorry, Alpha - guess you live on in IA-64 (the "IA" stands for "Inetl's Alpha").
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
If anyone's got some of those end-of-line-no-one-wants-them-anymore alpha servers - particulary the really powerful ones- I'll gladly take them :)
attn digital: I'll take what's leftover of your stock too- you can ship it direct to my address.
best of all- I'll do it for free- call it a public service, if you will.
I don't get it.
Oh, where is ObviousGuy when we need him?
chopped liver?
As a CPU buff, I ordered a back-issue of Microprocessor Report where they discussed the introduction of the Alpha in glowing terms. The radical chip architecture and speed-at-any-price mentality was new at the time, but quickly proved itself to be the superior chip design approach. For most of the 1990s, the Alpha was the fastest chip on the market in both integer and floating point operations.
Alpha was a Risc chip's risc chip. The IBM Power architecture has dozens of operations and permutations; the Alpha has a handful. This contributed not only to the Alpha's speed, but also to its insatiable demands for memory. DEC introduced a code-translator that allowed the Alpha to run x86-32 binaries at native speeds, but warned that memory requirements would grow substantially. The software never became cost effective.
But, towards the turn of the millennium, something strange happened: the Pentium Pro architecture (happily renamed PII and PIII) inched towards the lead in integer operations. The P4 actually surpassed the Alpha chips. Intel had, by then, hired away some of the Alpha designers and began to adopt its performance enhancing strategies. How could Intel catch up to the Alpha when Intel was burdened with an architecture as convoluted as x86?
Strangely, the x86 architecture can also be a benefit to chip design. Because x86 compresses commonly used instructions into tiny, awkward byte codes, the P4 generation of chips requires less memory and fewer cache misses - and the convoluted opcodes can be decoded quickly by the processor prior to dispatch. In the long run, Alpha's simplified instruction set proved to be less useful than machine-code x86 compatibility; and x86 chips are now little more than Alpha chips sitting behind an x86 instruction decoder. The Alpha design lives on in every CPU you buy, whether it be AMD or Intel.
For further reading, check out CPU performance numbers on http://www.spec.org and read the commentary on Microprocessor Report.
Their plan to move everyone to itanic appears to have backfired. Has itanic finally sunk?
Stick Men
Then we switched over to a trouble report tracking program instead of doing everything on paper. The thing was implemented in house and made to run on the VAX'es. Suddenly everything slowed to a crawl, both development and trouble tracking. Since managers were the primary users of the tracking software, we knew it would have visibility. There was much rejoicing when the company bought a DEC Alpha...
...and put only the tracking software on it. No development work was allowed at all on teh new machine.
SIGH. The salad days of youth...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Yeah found the quote on main page hidden at bottom:
SDF uses DEC (hp) Alphas running NetBSD, TOPS-20 and Symbolics GENERA
Yes, shall we die together : )
At least we will be less prone to receiving virii in the future. Who writes a virus for a dead OS??
Does this mean they'll be uber-cheap on ebay? I for one would love to get my hands on an Alpha box.
---
Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach
Those who don't know how, supervise
Any bets on whether we'll ever see the Digital logo on the front page of /.?
Alpha...dead? Zordon must be pissed...
so... we got a new category here, "digital" and the first article in that category is about the end of The_Beg^W Alpha.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
That quote has been hidden for five years, and now you'v blown their cover! I hope you'r happy mister....
Windows is only $500 if your time is worthless.
We didn't have any of this fancy-pants CPU-on-a-chip stuff. We built our computers by hand. 74xx TTL IC chips wirewrapped together. And by god we LIKED it.
Wirewrap? Luxury. We used to round up a brace of kids from t'orphanage, and build our prototypes by telling 'em to lick their fingers and touch t'pins of the vacuum tubes. And back then, there weren't no fancy '1's -- our binary were all '0's!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
We're selling a whole lot of them.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
On the alpha box i worked with, at boot time an image of a cowboy on a horse was displayed. That rocked.
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
HP quoted close to 5K each for an OS upgrade for a few alphaservers left with my company.. looks like they really want the alpha / tru64 platform to die..
Alpha-based servers will continue to be sold through 2006, and supported through 2011. Farewell, Alpha; the world's line of chips seems to have declined to Intel and a handful of niche guys. Im not sure about you but Proccesors it looks like there are alot more players in the game other than alpha, and power 4 beats the crap outa alpha, dont even get me started on the RS series.
it is running Deb 64 and still does circles around my intel boxes. Looking back I'd have to say the mis-management of the century results in the world running MS on x86, when we should be os/2 on aplha. OS/2 did windows better than windows did windows in the beginning and the Aplha arch is simply awesome. Oh well the technically correct solution usually loses to the cheap and dirty solution....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If you have a system on the Alpha that is say, 3 years old, and you were expecting to upgrade in 2 years, then this forces a decision: go through a PAINFUL migration expense now, or make a capital investment to push it off.
Remember, buying equipment is easily depreciated over 3 years for PCs, probably longer is reasonable for Big Iron (I don't mean for tax purposes, I mean for their financials). If it costs me $0.5m in capital costs spread out over 5 years to upgrade a LOT of Alpha machines, even if it only costs me $200k to migrate off the platform, I may prefer to buy the Alphas that will only hit earnings by $100k...
It also depends, what is IT's budget for new hardware vs. budget for software migration expenses.
Also, if you were planning to buy a new Alpha to replace your old one, this is a smart time to buy it, because you can avoid dealing with the software migration now. Let's say you need to upgrade within 12 months, would you rather rush a migration job, or buy the gear and deal with the migration in 3-4 years, when you have time to plan.
Well WE didn't have any of this artsy-fartsy integrated circuit stuff. WE had to solder individual transistors on to circuit boards. It was a hard life, but we LIKED it.
Valid point, if the person who modded that flamebait had ever priced Alpha, MIPS, SPARC or POWER machines against x86 they would realize it's bang on the money.
Okay, for a lot less than those prices, I'll take me a multiprocessor Opteron machine, thankyouverymuch.
The biggest advantage is that the odds of the latest 1337 h4xx0r scripting their way into a BSD OS on a non-Intel architecture is roughly zero. I still keep current on the latest security patches, of course, but the relative obscurity is a nice extra layer of defense.
Best of all, though, is seeing kernel messages like "Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xfffffc00006bc000.". All of those 'f's in front are a sure sign that we're not in IA32 anymore.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Transistors? Count yerself lucky, young man! We never had anything like solid-state electronics. We had to use vacuum tubes. The damn things would break down all the time, you counted seconds per cycle instead of cycles per second, debugging involved flashlights, ladders and hard hats, but god damn it, we LIKED it.
Every so often we see this story pop up in Slashdot. "Oh, that's sad," we think, reminiscing nostalgically about the VMS workstations of the 80's. We go on about our business and a year or so passes, then we get another story predicting the death of the Alpha. So to all you "Death of Alpha" submitters, I have one thing to say. "It's not dead. It's restin'."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have an UP2000+ with 2x833Mhz 21264 4MB cache each. Every single cpu beats my 2.4GHz intel box in a simple "openssl speed" test, now considering it's a dual, it'll probably kick every single intel chip for the years to come. Considering that these chips were manufactured in 2000, you now realize how the x86 chips are such a bad design.
Somehow I don't see IBM/Motorola, AMD and Sun as being members of a 'handful of niche guys' when it comes to chip manufacturing.
But then again, what do I know.
Vacuum tubes? Well, in my day we had it tough. We used mechanical gears. And most of them didn't even fit right. Seconds per cycle? We were happy even just to get an answer without having to re-oil the damn thing. And you were lucky not to lose a limb while debugging. And you know what, we LIKED more than any kind of new-fangled VACUUM TUBES.
Maybe that's why some contries banned Apple's misleading advertising!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Gears? Well, in MY day, we had to use BEADS on a STICK. I would have LOVED to have oiled my sticks, I still have scars from all the splinters. And you know what? We LIKED it.
mechanical gears? oil?
That would be luxury, my good man. We had to find twigs and straw that were in the general shape of computing bits and then we had to whip oxen to provide the needed lubrication to just multiply two numbers together.
oh wait... you mean someone already posted this? you say 50 people already posted this? gee, i just im just contributing noise to the signal. at least im sure nobody else will make the same mistake.
I see your point. AMD is RISCy inside and Intel-ish (x86-ish) outside. It doesn't matter how the x86 is implemented in the core, the fact remains that an x86 instruction set is exposed and AMD processors are designed to be compatible with a patched, broken and outdated instruction set. That is what I meant by Intel Architecture, I should have made that more clear. Otherwise you could argue that even Intel processors are not "Intel Architecture" anymore since they too emulate x86 with microinstructions. Heck Intel is the one who wanted to run away from x86 with its Itanium line, that hasn't gone well so far. Alpha on the other side was a "beautiful" architecture, well thought, scalable, good design. Well, maybe that is just my oppinion.
We're about 6 months into our 4 year lease of the OpenVMS cluster, 4 ES47's with 7Tb of storage. Built like a tank, runs forever, and is an excellent Oracle DB server. Problem is the OS isn't a commody operating system, and not much runs on it any more (that we need). Our vendors are dropping support for the platform as well, so the move is on to start a migration plan, probably to linux.
Have run alpha's for a long time, and they are still screamers. Problem is, you'll scream, then have a heart attack at the HP prices. Our current environment mentioned about was around $1.5M.
From the #kernelnewbies fortune file:
I would suggest re-naming "rmbdd()". I _assume_ that "dd" stands for "data
dependent", but quite frankly, "rmbdd" looks like the standard IBM "we
lost every vowel ever invented" kind of assembly lanaguage to me.
I'm sure that having programmed PPC assembly language, you find it very
natural (IBM motto: "We found five vowels hiding in a corner, and we used
them _all_ for the 'eieio' instruction so that we wouldn't have to use
them anywhere else").
- Linus Torvalds on linux-kernel
At the lab I work at we have 3 alpha workstations and an alpha server. The server still runs d|i|g|i|t|a|l VMS, which was last updated some time ago. The alpha workstations are running BSD. Of course, this is coming from a lab that has a 6 cabinent VAX 11/750 running BSD. Which, by my definition means the VAX isn't dead, and its still useful for things like telemetry data recorded on 1970's balloon campaings. If anyone wants to know the lab's field its expiramental study of the global electic field. I'm working as a programer for data conversions, getting stuff off the VAX so we can retire it.
Beads on a stick? In my day, we had to SACRIFICE GOATS and study the entrails. And you know what, WE LIKED IT.
The K6 is a craptacular 386 but an excellent processor. I always forget which is which between -mcpu and -march but if you optimize your 386 code for K6 you don't get great results, but if you optimize your code for the K6 itself you do get great results. These old machines are therefore a great argument for gentoo :)
By definition intel processors are intel architecture, but the fact that the architecture is so varied is the very reason that we now refer to processors by their assorted code names, like banias, prescott, hammer, et cetera.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ogg attempts reply,
Lameness filter interferes.
ME OOG NEVER USE NO STICK. ME BEAT THINGS ON HEAD WITH ROCK.
--Oog the open source caveman
Digital could not market for shit.
And that was on a good day.
Yes, there were certainly some engineering and management blunders (mostly management) but Marketing was completely inept.
During the 70s the PDPs practically sold themselves, and during the 80s VAX literally sold itself; it was the hottest thing you could hope to get. So when the big Unix wave came, with its cheap-ass Sun hardware, and so-called software compatibility, the Marketing droids could not cope, and the former #2 computer manufacturer is now just a zit on HPs ass.
Do I sound bitter? nooooooo.......
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Microsoft Windows NT 3.5 was ported to Alpha platform by programmers from Digital Equipment Corporation (hereinafter DEC) and it was not true 64bit processing. It didn't allow a long int, and that is the easiest example I can give you. It also didn't support as much RAM as it would have in 64bit mode. DEC's programmers also caused a small intellectual property dispute by actually using much of DEC's VMS code to compliment porting Microsoft Windows NT 3.5 unto Alpha, to much blessings and praise from Microsoft's high-end customers for its verry quick GUI performance complimentary to the excellent floating-point performance known of Alpha, and for this Microsoft was verry angered. NT version 4.0 had the VMS inclusions removed and that port was governed more-so by Microsoft. DEC was one of the first external porting groups to see Microsoft's code. Although WikiPedia says there is not a port of Microsoft Windows 2000 to the Alpha; that is a half-lie; it was not officialy released for Windows 2000 to be ported, and some of our friendly geek Microsoft employees leaked the Alpha platform version of Windows 2000 to the public. Even Microsoft knows that merit of its software existing on a high-end architecture improves its portfolio for contracts on super-computers.
Sincerily,
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
Since the early 80's it has been Intel's chips and a niche market. Sometimes the niche share was larger than Intel's share and based on the usage (auto, military, embedded, appliance) was and is significantly larger. Although some other chips were better and most had better initial architecture than the X86, the "Intel Inside" slogan really carried them through the initial PC years. I think Motoroly and MicroChip still sell a larger volume of Microcontrollers than Intel's PC line, but that little bit of information was not shown during my search for volumes.
A customer enters a pet shop. /* - faster run time */ /* A[x][y][z][t]=sin(x+1)*sin(y+1)*sin(z+1)*sin(t+1); - takes more time */ ...(owner types an answer)
Customer: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint.
(The owner does not respond.)
C: 'Ello, Miss?
Owner: What do you mean "miss"?
C: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
O: We're closin' for lunch.
C: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this ALPHA what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
O: Oh yes, the, uh, the DEC ALPHA...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
C: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
O: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.
C: Look, matey, I know a ARCHITECTURE when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
O: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable CPU, the DEC ALPHA, idn'it, ay? Beautiful FP PERFORMANCE!
C: The FP PERFORMANCE don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
O: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!
C: All right then, if he's restin', I'll wake him up! (shouting at the cage) '#include
#include
#define X 128
#define Y 128
#define Z 128
#define T 120
double A[X][Y][Z][T]; int x, y, z, t;
main() { printf("\nprogram uses %g MBytes\n",X*(float)Y*Z*T*8.0/1.0e6);
for (x=0;xX;++x) { for (y=0;yY;++y) {
for (z=0;zZ;++z) { for (t=0;tT;++t) {
A[x][y][z][t]=(x+1)*(y+1)*(z+1)*(t+1);
} } } } }
O: There, it worked!
C: No, he didn't, that was you Typing!
O: I never!!
C: Yes, you did!
O: I never, never did anything...
C: (yelling and hitting CPU) 'EHELO POLLY!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock alarm call! (Takes CPU OUT OF CASE and thumps it on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)
C: Now that's what I call a DEAD ALPHA.
O: No, no.....No, 'e's stunned!
C: STUNNED?!?
Long live the (dirt cheap) Alphas! ;)
Those with critical VMS-based systems are breathing a sigh of relief that there will be support and replacement hardware for their old-but-reliable servers that have been running VMS non-stop, 24/7/365 for the past DECADE. If you are used to that kind of reliability you are obviously the type that would be advers to changing the entire hardware architecture until the last possible moment. Many of them are the type of folks who wailed and gnashed teeth when they had to migrate from the old VAX hardware to theie "new fangled" 200 MHz Alpha-based hardware--and it still ran the same OS!
Anyways, I haven't seen a lot of discussion on what happens to the IP (Intellectual Property) once HP puts the Alpha out to pasture for good. I'd like to see it released to the public domain or made "open source" so royalty-free implementations can continue to be made by a large number of third parties. It would be very cool if any Joe Blow could download the VHDL or Verilog files to synthisize their very own Alpha-core-based FPGAs!
the world's line of chips seems to have declined to Intel and a handful of niche guys
Didn't know that AMD is out of the game now. Guess they don't sell 64bit CPU's anymore...but we got those 64bit Intel chips in everything now don't we? Whoa...look-at-em go!
I also didn't hear that the PowerPC architecture was all gone too...guess they're just selling what little inventory they have to the "niche" Apple market...but everyone know's that Apple's dying....any...day...now....
Pfft...the submitter should remove head from rectum...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I have a Compaq Alpha Workstation that originally ran NT. It's currently running debian, and it does so pretty well. I made the mistake of doing a dist-upgrade, which on the alphas tends to break things. Bah. I was wanting to put gentoo on it anyways. They are special machines. Took me a while to even get the boot loader down, but when you do... nice.
-J
Fire in the sky
Actually most of Intel's Itanic (itanium for your wonkies) engineers are former DEC Alpha engineers.
i have never been able to find a cheap 21264 (ev6) based system. i'm still stuck with my wonderful but dated 666mhz 164lx.
In '96 I was in college taking my IT program and my greatest dream was to scrape up the money to build a multi-processor Alpha box... yes, I was pathetic...but just think of all those CPU cycles going unused!!
this is sad as Alpha never failed technically and was basically killed by the management at Compaq/HP. Once the first mass produced 64-bit CPU and for a long time the fastest processor in existence, even right now, Alpha still remains one of the fastestest CPUs on the market :-
I heard MIPS is going the same way. The only non-x86 guys that remain standing are IBM/Power and Sun/UltraSPARC and I am not so sure about Sun's ability to compete with Intel in future given their recent record..
...I like to think of it as the new Alpha, but with a fancy bytecode compressor (called x86-64) which doubles as a compatibility layer. :)
DEC killed the alpha, and no one else. Heck, you simply couldn't *buy* the chip, unless (maybe) you really worked at it. I remember trying to get one in the mid-90's. You had to really struggle to find out exactly where to get it, *if* anyone would return your calls. Then the web took off, but even that was just a rehash.
I really wanted some of these babys.
I suppose my problem was that I wasn't a huge OEM. Let that be a lesson to those marketing folks: kill the hacker market, and your technology isn't going to prosper as much as it should.
Help me please hack my registry to turn on quadalphabilinair mappng support so I can get shadows on my Nvidia TNT2!!!1
thanx.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Wow, the Alpha was dead before DEC even got it into production!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Wow... man. I knew that with the death of DEC would eventually see the death of the Alpha. I worked on these babies when they first debuted in 94/95, and again at MCI in 97. I worked on both the NT4 platform and the Digital Unix platform, and they were some of the sweetest machines I've ever had the privelege of working with. I wish I had stuck around with them, but I made the right decision leaving the day Worldcom bought 'em. Wonder what ever happened to that server farm.. we had 8 Alpha-servers round-robinned to do call routing and billing. Fastest things on microchips at the time. The speed at which they could process a call from start to finish was insane! Especially given that this was 7 years ago now. Ahhhhh... the good ole days! :P
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
(not that I recommend it).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
. . . until GCC stops supporting it.
As a CPU buff, I ordered a back-issue of Microprocessor Report where they discussed the introduction of the Alpha in glowing terms.
You described Microprocessor Report's old paper as "glowing"? I have that same pamphlet in front of me and it is nothing glowing about it! It's just an infomercial with some tidbits on who will be selling the workstations and advertising it is 64bit.
Moderators, this "glassware" user has been jumping into all the forums at wired.com to spread his propoganda. Says so many thing and it is obvious only supports Intel and goes as far as mentioning old dates of articles in near unknown journalism editorials to uninformed forum users to "uphold" his statments.. Some of his other trolls at wired.com were such fanatical that they seemed funny in the "epileptic monkey" sort of way, but that does NOT excuse him from the heavy cursing you've done to hurt the feelings of the wired.com forum participants. And your Slashdot posting is almost exposed, you jerk.
glassware, please stop spreading lies and stay out of the wire.com and slashdot forums. Moderators, for the sake of the history behind his userID, please appropriatly mod him down; for the good of the slashdot experience.
the Alpha had it's death warrant signed when DEC allowed themselves to be played by MS in the NT vs OS/2 wars of the early 90's.
As soon as NT got real traction on Intel, they tossed DEC aside like the cheap whore they were.
but then again, maybe I am just being ornery
I'm not the poster you were responding to, yet I happened to have my hand shoved up my ass this moment.
When I pulled my hand out of my ass, it was clenched around an ipod. Then as I walked out of the Apple store in the Mission Viejo Mall at California, I reached into my wallet to see the receipt of how many hundreds of dollars I shit for this Ipod and noticed that I used your Driver's License and your American Express card to purchase it!
<Arnold Schwarzenigger mask>
Hey, I am you and you are me!
</Arnold Schwarzenigger mask>
Just to make sure I wasn't dreaming, I took this picture out of your wallet that looks like your second cousin I think, and I shoved that picture back up my ass and walked back into the Apple store to see if maybe a black cat would walk by thrice as like in the movie Matrix. I didn't see a cat, so I left.
Quoth {
"DEC's programmers also caused a small intellectual property dispute by actually using much of DEC's VMS code to compliment porting Microsoft Windows NT 3.5 unto Alpha, to much blessings and praise from Microsoft's high-end customers for its verry quick GUI performance"
} Quoth
I have Windows NT 3.5 and VMS on my Alpha XP1000. My friends always wondered why the Windows GDI functions were faster in Windows NT 3.5 as opposed to Windows NT 4.0. Thanks for revealing that ol' history of VMS in NT 3.5. Hope someone mods you up. It's posters like you that improves the quality of slashdot.
Alpha is dying...
Farewell, Alpha; the world's line of chips seems to have declined to Intel and a handful of niche guys.
Wait a minute, Alpha was a niche processor (workstations).
And Intel's x86 architecture *IS* a niche processor, if you are referring to PCs. PCs are a niche product, representing a *SMALL* portion of the microprocessor marketplace.
If you mean Intel, as in xScale, Alpha, x86 and IA-64... how's that a reduction, since Intel is still around?
Mmmm, should that not be "the world's line of chips seems to have declined to ARM and a handful of niche guys."
Or "the world's line of desktop chips seems to have declined to Intel and a handful of niche guys."
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Not by your interpretations of events, and certainly not because Intel hired a bunch of Alpha engineers (that came much later). Unfortunately it's so old now that I can't find a reference to it in google, but you seem to be blissfully unaware of the law suit that DEC brought against Intel over the theft of Alpha IP that mysteriously found its way into the Pentium architecture. I was working for DEC at the time as a Tru64/Alpha support engineer, so I do.
Some time prior to that there had been a quiet attempt at collaberation between DEC and Intel over the Alpha chip. I believe it was in a vain attempt to try and get Intel to adopt the Alpha architecture for future designs. Whatever the purpose, Intel were given extensive Alpha design docs to look at. Eventually they turned down the offer and went their own way.
I remember eyebrows being raised inside DEC sometime after when the Pentium architecture started to make some very surprising, unexpected and unforecast performance leaps.
It took some time to gather the evidence, but eventually Bob Palmer launched a law suit against Intel for theft of Alpha IP. For a while DEC were threatening to halt all Pentium shipments and demand large unspecified damages. Bob P should have stuck to his guns and screwed Intel for all he could get, but instead (being the bean counter he was and not a technologist) he saw this as an opportunity to unburden DEC of the escalating costs of constantly refitting the FAB production plants. Work that was needed to meet the next chip shrink goals and keep Alpha ahead of the game.
In the end a deal was done. Intel brought all the Alpha fabrication and production plants off DEC, including StrongARM, and agreed to guarantee to produce Alphas for DEC for a number of years (I forget how many).
DEC still kept control of the Alpha design & development, and it wasn't until much later after the Compaq buy out, in one last act of Corporate infanticide from a cadre of incompetent senior managers that lntel finally got their hands on the full set of Alpha technologies.
But then that's what you get when Accountants run computer companies, not technologists and visionaries.
Make no mistake about it, if DEC management had believed in Alpha technology as much as the rest of the people in the company, and DEC had kept the FAB plants and invested in them as they had originally planned to do, and there had been no Comaq buy out, you would today be looking at SMT Alpha EV8 chips running somewhere around the speeds of todays Pentium chips
Macka
In the late 80's RISC was an immensely poweful concept. Fabrication technology had advanced to the point where it was just barely practical to dispense with slow microcode and hardcode and entire useful instruction set. But you had to be very selective in what you implimented. Spending gates on performance rather than high level instruction handling is what allowed 12Mhz Sparc and MIPS processors to stomp on 25MHz 68K's.
In the 90's, Alpha's "RISC at any cost" allowed clock frequencies that CISC chips could only dream of.
But today's CPU are huge and obcenely complex. Instruction decoding is a tiny part of that these monster chips do. In almost doesn't matter what the user visable instruction set is. It always gets chopped up and re-ordered anyway. What does matter is market share. Huge chips require a small army of font end designers to design all the resource allocation and instruction re-ordering. They require a large army of back end engineers to create a vast array of custom cells, layout the chip, and tune the process. That means you must you must sell a very large number of parts if you want to keep those armies on staff. A superior instruction set helps only a little. Inadequately funded physical design hurts a lot. With the possible exception of PowerPC, RISC architectures just don't generate enough revenue to keep up.
you've got that right.
ex-dec emp
It was definitely marketing, but it was more than that.
Compaq dragged their heels on following Digital's development plan, and then pronounced its doom suspiciously close to the HP acquisition. Compaq *could* market, and if Compaq had understood what they'd got from DEC and really worked on expanding the Alpha business instead of going toe to toe against Dell's lower margins they and the Alpha would probably still be in business.
Mentec, who *did* understand what *they* got from DEC, is still selling PDP-11s.
since it is now replacing SGI's MIPS and HP/CPQ's PA/RISC and maybe ALPHA chips. I agree though that it isn't going to gain any market share wrt x86 or x86-64 (or even POWER). It might kill SPARC though.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
I believe that TI does SUN's chip fabbing for them, SUN only does the design part. I'm actually surprised that Sun hasn't bought AMD and designed their future on x86-64 and linux/solaris, and sold SPARC to Fujitsu.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
You sound very very drunk. Funny how drunk people are pretty good at telling it how it is, though.
I believe that the alpha team was moved to Intel as part of the HP/Itanium deal. But this only happened after many members of the team were laid off/left. I think the lead Alpha designer actually works/ed for AMD now. The K8 and some of the K7 was primarily designed by that group.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
doesn't matter what the user visable instruction set is.
... the ones that were once thought outrageously hot but now seem merely tepid, and heat is turning into the next bottleneck in processor design.
Sure it does. The further the instruction set is from what the processor's doing internally, the more time it takes for the front end to feed reordered instructions or recompiled instructions to the real ALU. The more time it takes, even if it all happens in parallel, the more latency there is between instruction fetch and useful work. When you combine that with a small register file that requires extra copies in and out of cache, even if that's simulated by a top-of-stack cache, you end up with huge pipelines and lots of instructions (real instructions hitting the internal ALU) that are just doing busywork.
The longer pipelines you need to implement these inappropriate instruction sets means that cache misses and branch mispredictions are more expensive, because they cause huge bubbles in the pipeline and lots of wasted instruction cycles.
Which means that your processors are running faster and hotter than RISC processors that do the same work
And that's why *despite* having a fraction of the resources directed to it than Intel or AMD have spent on their monster chips, and despite real neglect even before its doom was pronounced, the Alpha was still the fastest kid on the block right up until the day when, shortly before HP bought them, Compaq announced they were shutting down the EV8 development and terminating the Alpha line.
No, a superior instruction set helps a lot. Not enough to satisfy Compaq, clearly, but more than enough that if Compaq had understood what they'd got from DEC and stuck to their original plans... instead of trying to outslug Dell on its own turf... EV8 would be the fastest chip on the market today.
The chief CPU architect at AMD helped design the Alpha. A lot of Digital people also ended up there.
When Compaq got rid of its Alpha stuff when it merged with HP - it sold it all off to Intel, which is using the technology in the new Pentium-M processors.
So while the Alpha as a chip might be about to die, its children live on.
Most of the few machines we still have left at work are Alphas. All the rest of the systems migrated to our German headquarters when we were bought and are running, poorly on a system I can't name or I will be hunted down and killed. The Alphas which remain include machines dating to 1994 that are still running, and running well. My only problem over the years has been getting OpenSource software to compile and run on these OSF/now Tru64 machines. Tru64 is one the finest Unix implementations I've ever used and the Alpha chip and machines made by DEC were built for the long haul. The heat and power issues aside, if you ever get the opportunity to get a DS10 for home use, buy it. The small Dec stations are pretty awesome, too. The older machines like the 2100 and 2000, unfortunately, don't support very large hard drives but they are the perfect size if you need an end table by your couch.
maybe one day i'll be smart enough to come up with a cool sig, too.
You are confusing architecture and CPU cores. AMD cores are not particularly like intels, they are however x86 and x86-64 architecture CPUs. I don't quite get why you seem to think having a different core (which is true even between different releases of a single series of chips, there are 3? different p4s?) equals being a different arch.
This is the same thing that happens to humanity. We live in an environment where the strong no longer are the ones that are surviving. We are in a world where the weak are encuraged and helped to survive.
blablablablabla
Guess the same thing happend to the Alpha.
The good thing about this is that i will have a good processor which i can raise hell with in hell.
As a former dec flag waver, this is a sad day. From the company that brought us the first 32-bit and 64-bit cpus, helped develop X-Windows, helped Microsoft with NT and provide a server platform with some credibilty, and whose platforms were among the first to run UNIX I'm sorry to see the demise of one of the best lines of cpus to bite the dust
Enter the Internet Boom, DEC's last chance at a comeback. How do you market a capable platform around DEC's chimp-loving marketeers? Why, do something that Sun, IBM etc. cannot. Three researchers at DEC did just that, in the summer of 1995.
Yes, we know about AltaVista's bellyflop as a portal. It was painful. But AV sold "more than 1000" AlphaServer 8400s, at an average MSRP over $1M a pop. It succeeded as intended, in spite of the lukewarm financial support from DEC's unimaginitive senior management.
...-.-
How many people have installed the following operating systems on an Alpha Based server?
- NT 4.0
- Apple Operating Systems
- AT LEAST two different flavors of Unix?
(Dolemite Raises his hand!)
Dolemite
___________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Seriously. Wouldn't this be a great time for HP to OpenSource the Alpha VHDL/Verilog Design? There is a project for open silicon. This would be a great investment and a hell of a tax writeoff to charity.
Let's say, conservatively, that DEC/CompaQ/HP sank $1B into Alpha design and it's current value in the market is (?) $500 million. Some tax guy do the calculations. 1/3 of $500 million might create a blip on HP's radar for a while.
OpenSource Alpha!
Check out...
www.opencores.com
You hit the nail on the head there mate.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Itanium performance when the Alpha IP that Intel 'acquired' starts to kick in. Hopefully HP will get their finger out of their arse and finish the Tru64/TruCluster technology migration in a similar time frame, and we might actually have a class Unix product to go along with the hardware -- again. HP-UX today doesn't even come close.
i forgot to add the following: my only question who would produce an open source, next generation alpha, its not exactly like burning a prom?
The most powerful 8 bitter ever made. Powered Williams arcade games. Featured user stack, full indexing including program counter relative.
Was possible to write reentrant and recursive code fairly easily directly in assembler.
Compared to the more popular (and brain dead, but somewhat fast 6502) the 6809 was the shit. --Glad I learned assembler on one. Learning that chip, and later the 68000, biased my view of CPUs forever. Intel looked like a sad, slow kludge in comparison.
Intel chips basically play the lotto. The faster you sift through the instructions, the more you will get done. Shove the bits in and let the cooling engineers sort 'em out. Blech.
Blogging because I can...
So when will HP start production on the Beta chip?
You're forgetting to factor in the additional costs of the extra Air Conditioning you're going to need for all those extra Xeons (installation and running costs). Boy do those things kick out some heat. Plus the electrical cost of running the Xeons, all that extra power they suck. Plus of the cost of extra sound insulation if your computer room is near any offices.
Think I'm joking on that last point? I helped install a 64 node Linux Xeon cluster last year in a room opposite a large office. One poor woman put up with the racket for about a week before moving her desk to the other end of the office
Oh, and BTW, a cluster of 20 Xeons is not necessarily more useful than 4 x 1.5 GHz Alphas in one box. It very much depend son the application you're using. Not to mention per cpu licensing costs on your layered products (I'm talking closed source here of cause).
Personally I'd rather have the Alphas
Macka
Politics killed it.
I can never forgive the non-tech managers that did it.
A robust hardware platform that excepts anything I throw at it. gone.
Thanks, jerks.
Retep Vosnul
Ah, that brings back sweet memories.
(CoCo3 was 68B09e.)
http://www.fact-index.com/t/tr/trs_80_color_comput er.html
I seem to remeber that a few former Alpha engineers ended up at AMD. But you are right that the IP was sold off to Intel.
See my journal, I write things there
These old machines are therefore a great argument for gentoo :)
Too bad that these machines are so old that it exacerbates the already atrocious times necessary to get a system up and running.
I'll get back to you in a few....months.
The x86 pain in the ASS is more than just a die area for translation circuitry!
A) Legacy instructions, legacy exceptions legacy... Pain in the ass, self modifying code detection.
B) Strong memory model. Reduces freedom in reordering stuff, or simply increases amount of time.
C) Amount of programmer visible registers, and lack of triadic operations.
D1)
In P4 the trace cache holds quite little number of instructions, because they are MUCH bigger than RISC instructions, and there is more of them for equivalent code.
D2)
Athlon line has extra predecode bits in its Icache and 3 large decoders. That consume POWER!
E) Amount of parallerism available trough the ISA, is limited.
F) Cost of adding parallerism is a LOT bigger in X86 because of
Decoders or tracecache parallerism costs more. POWER, and latency/clockspeed.
All the myriadic exception models have to be compatible.
More memory renaming required and all pain in there.
FLAGS! Renaming, and all trickery making that work so that it won't hurt parellerism,
and accessed by most execution units!
G) Clock speed is hurt because of the issue. Remember than IBM and SUN ran 1/3 of clock speed of alpha all the time, because of their design methology, until alpha lost their fab. The clock speed is more function of design methology, but ISA adds more complexity on some structures, complexity increase the distance travelled so that hurts clock speed, but intel has superiour fabbing and design methology for doing full custom designs.
Now A, and D brings to a nice little point. LEAKAGE POWER which is growing component. Logic transistors leak 30 times the cache transistors. Besides even for inorder RISC:s CPU:s decode and fetch consume most of power so, that is where the X86 complexity hurts, most.
Now the scale of economics, is the reason why X86 is as fast as it is. When you do full custom circuit design there is no way a semiasic design methology will catch you in performance or performance/watt, if goals are same. If you wan't to compare RISC vs X86 go for similar design methology use VIA for X86 candidate, and G4+ for risc. Intel and AMD and Alpha are compareble, up until 0.35u EV6. Yes thats a 600mhz OO 4 inst/cycle risc design made in similar process as under 300mhz PII:s , and that trounced everything. Too bad it came late for Digital. After that there is no highperformance targetting RISC with full custom designmethology available. Power is highly limited by its design methology in terms of clockspeed and instruction latencies, and having different design methology would simply increase the fixed costs for IBM so much that the scale of economics is not there. And for embedded market they prefere ability to customize the processor for customers so design methology choise is obvious for them.
One small point, in power comsumption execution units are CHEAP, its fetch, reorder, and decode that costs power. Cache too is cheap in power comsumption based. So lots of cache and execution units is cheap in powercomsumption and the rest is where the power comsumption lies mostly. Exceptions, decode, fetch, and reorder. Now in ALL things in the list X86 ISA makes things more complex than equivalent RISC, and spends more transistors in there.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
... at least that's what I've heard. My admittedly limited experience with a few Agilent instruments confirm this. Solid quality.
You're so wrong it's funny, but nice try.
By the way, anything other than theoretical differences between CISC and RISC are totally meaningless in todays CPU's anyway. The most CISC'y CPU's available such as the Hammer are really RISC cores. They're RISC/CISC hybrids. Even POWER CPU's have a lot of CISC features in them, and I don't think anyone could argue that POWER or PowerPC are "Reduced Instruction Sets".
I knew that the world was coming to an end when my favorite pub ran out of my favorite beer and my favorite sandwich. It's only logical that the Alpha would be sent to the chopping block.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
If HP releases the architecture under a nice licence the Alpha architecture could be the first CPU with a open development cycle: the community develops and any company is free to produce the monster.
I don't know if there are any legal obstacles?
WHAT?!?!? The Pentium M is based upon Intel's old P6 (Pentium Pro/II/III), with major modifications.
It uses the Pentium 4's quad pumped bus and SSE2. What DEC tech does it use?
Now, in the AMD corner, it's another story. The K7's bus was Alpha's double pumped EV6 bus, and I've heard that HyperTransport is the latest version of the EV67 bus, but I haven't seen anything to prove that.
I have one "word" for you: distcc
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Writing assembler on that thing was pretty damn easy, and all the nice addressing modes!
A 64 bit version would be interesting today. Heck a 32 bitter given the core design philosophies would punch well above its weight!
Blogging because I can...
IBM's System/390 is still very much around, so x86 isn't the only CISC holdout. I had a professor in college who firmly believed that in 20 years, two instruction set architectures would rule the world, modern variants of x86 and System/360. Still doesn't seem too far fetched.
His conclusion was based on a single principle: backwards compatibility is INCREDIBLY important, and those are the two architectures with the least movable installed base.
ARM and POWER seem to be the two RISC instruction set architectures settling in for the long term, so I'd probably call the RISC/CISC battle a draw.
As for internal design, the RISC processors came up with good microarchitectures that CISC processors then copied. This didn't make them have non-CISC instruction sets, it was just a different implementation underneath.