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.

Comments

only intel?

[lavaface]

what about IBM's powerPC ???

Re:only intel?

[akuma(x86)]

IBM is a niche. Sun is a niche. Alpha, even in it's glory days, was a niche. AMD has 15-20% of the x86 market and is just slightly larger than a niche.

Intel ships 1 million Prescotts a week(http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/2004 0512151634.html). This is not even full production capacity. This all done in 90nm technology -- a full 6 months ahead of anyone else. There were on the order of hundreds of millions of Northwoods sold and they are still selling.

That's probably more volume in a single week than the entire IBM + Sun + Alpha volume for an entire year.

Why is this the case? It is RIDICULOUSLY expensive to manufacture CPUs in this day and age. If you DON'T ship on the order of 1 million a week, you will never recover the costs necessary to build the all of the fabs.

This is why Sun will eventually abandon SPARC. This is why IBM loses money in their microelectronics division, but will probably maintain POWER and eat the costs for strategic reasons. This is why HP/SGI and others have gone with Itanium.

This is not to discount the technical acheivments of the these CPUs. I design processors for a living and have great respect for the Alpha design team. But at the end of the day, the only reason someone is going to fund the design a computer is to make money. Only the profitable survive.

Will anyone actually be *using* this?

[sarahemm]

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 ;)

Re:Sad

[plover]

I read this in the article too, and all I could think was "but what about the PowerPC family?" Is that all the Mac is: a "niche" player?

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.)

Don't forget PowerPC

[PCM2]

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?

What's Changed?

[CommieOverlord]

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.

Re:Sad

[sp0rk173]

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.

"Niche guys"?

[ScottGant]

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...

Re:"Niche guys"?

[Tassach]

By "Intel" the article should have said "x86". The x86 architecture, as fundimentally flawed as it is, has driven virtually everything else out of the market. Alpha's gone, PA-RISC is going, SPARC is on it's way out. The Power/PowerPC a architecture is hanging in there, so there's still some choice left for main-line computing.

Of course the power of the various embedded processors (Dragonball,StrongARM) and single-chip computers are rising to the point that they could be meet most user's computing needs. We've reached the point where average users don't need any more power; they need the same power with less heat & noise and more reliability & stability.