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

Sad

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Beta

[attam]

incidentally, at MIT there is a course called 6.004 (Computation Structures) that all CS and EE undergrads have to take... in that class we implement a simulator for a processor called the "Beta" which is essentially a scaled-down alpha...

B-2 Memories, Management

[Embedded Geek]

I worked with about 400 other developers on the embedded software for the B-2 Bomber. As our groups grew, the VAX clusters we used began to suffer. We complained to management but there was never any money for better mainframes.

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...

Re:Will anyone actually be *using* this?

[johnalex]

Actually, we're signing for a new one in a few days now. If you have software running on OpenVMS, the Alpha is still the chip to have.

BTW, we're retiring a 1994-model DEC (yes, Digital!) Alpha 2100 with a 200 MHz (yes, that's megahertz) processor. The thing has run 24x7 for nearly 10 years and probably averaged less than a day downtime a year. We downed it only for hardware upgrades. We're replacing it with an DS 25, 2 processors, 2 GB RAM (our original had a whopping 64 MB when we bought it) and 5 36 GB drives (our original 2100 had 4 1 GB drives, and we were top stuff in town!). My, I'm feeling old.

Re:AMD CPU's are using licensed Alpha tech

[red floyd]

AMD used the EV6 bus in the K6-K7 processors.

The K6 used the Pentium bus. It was a drop-in replacement. Aanyone remember the Shuttle HOT-569 with the i430TX chipset? Mine has a K6-2 sitting in its little Socket 7.

The K7 aka Athlon did use the EV6 bus. I never understood why nobody made an Athlon=>Alpha shim board to run to run an K7 in an Alpha EV6 box or vice versa.

M6890E

[PotatoHead]

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.