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.