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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.
one of the "X is Dead" comments can be true!
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!!"
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 who knows what the future will bring? AMD may diverge so far from Intel that they may eventually be considered their own architecture.
I think the chip market is about as dead as *BSD (*according to Netcraft.)
John
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 think we're conflating "manufacturer" with "architecture", here. AMD's 32-bit offerings are basically software-compatible with Intel's 32-bit stuff (the exceptions would be SSE2 and such).
I guess the poster's point was that there aren't any widely-used architectures out there besides the x86 stuff, which was originally developed by Intel, was a solely Intel offering for a very long time (close to 15 years, I think), and which is still synonymous with Intel. Despite the fact that AMD, VIA, and a couple of other outfits make x86 CPUs.
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.
NetCraft confirms: NetCraft jokes are dying!
Long live NetCraft jokes!
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.
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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.
I don't get it.
Oh, where is ObviousGuy when we need him?
yeah i'm agreeing with this one. I hope PPC starts really moving - it's got some damn nice architecture behind it...POWER5's are going to be awesome. I would love to see the market open up for PPC, and start to see them sold next to Athlons and P4's.
As far as AMD goes, they did a damn fine thing with AMD64. Hopefully they keep it up and keep diverging from intel, while still offering a cheaper and (in some cases) technologically superior competating product. I would hate to see the day when Intel really does own the processor market.
HP doesn't want people buying them, else they might realize that they perform better than comparitively- clocked Itanium kit :3
... what's on the IA-64 roadmap, I wonder.)
(Though to be fair, Itanium 2 was a lot better
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.
The 2-4% is overall market share. You have to consider that an awful lot of WinTel PCs end up as cash registers or some other single-purpose vertical market application. In the market for "i'm going to buy a computer, sit it on my desk, and interact with it" I think Apple's share is probably higher. Would you buy a Mac to use it as a cash register? Unlikely unless you happen to be Apple. Would you buy a Mac for office productivity, email, web browsing, and maybe a game or two? Reasonable people can and do say yes.
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.
It's truly scary how the Intel is becoming the only mainstream chip architecture left alive.
That dominant 386 instruction set has grown larger than life, threatening even Intel, who was responsible for its initial creation.
Intel's Itanium line has been a business flop, while AMD stuck to x86 compatibility in its K8 x86-64 development and is thereby is making inroads into Intel's market.
The realities of a market demanding
- cheap,
- standard and
- backward compatibility
are dictating to mighty Intel where they have to go if they don't want to end up dead-ended in the high end RISC market like SPARC, PA-RISC, MIPS and Alpha."Provided by the management for your protection."
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
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.
What the hell are you all talking about?!
VAXes (surprise, surprise) had VAX CPUs, not Alphas.
They had to rename the operating system from VAX/VMS to Open VMS/VAX and OpenVMS/Alpha.
Kids today... I'm surprised no-one's made a comment about Pentium-powered PowerMacs or something equally non-sensical.
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.
Competing. I saw that right after I hit submit, and cringed in fear of spelling nazis.
Competating is kind of a neat sounding word, though.
It would be a slow evoultionary process. They've already started it by implementing x86-64, and Intel had to play catch-up. I would imagine them continuing the AMD64 line for a while, then crafting another intersting innovation, and continue, in an iterative fashion, while you see big propritary operating systems like windows adapting to their changes and taking advantage of it (assuming these changes are beneficial to adapt to, of course). Slowly you'll see two different achitectures emerge from the same base arch as 64-bit becomes commonplace. I think the fan base behind both AMD and Intel will keep both companies alive, so long as they both perform on around the same level. It'll probably take a damn long time - if it happens at all - but with x86-64, amd showed that it can actually innovate and not just make a cheap, fast, hot pentium-clone. If they keep that up, and keep their quality where it's at right now...i think it could happen.
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.
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.
'fake 64-bit nonsense' - Care to elaborate?
emt-64 is an amd-64 compatible extenstion to the P4. How is it fake 64 bitness unless Opteron and the A64 line are also fake 64 bit nonsense?
Or are you refering to Itanium? Last check, it was a fully 64 bit capible sysetm, no signs of 'fake 64-bit nonsense' there either.
Geez, if you're going to troll, atleast do a good job at it.
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