Slashdot Mirror
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?
Damn, sure took them a while to get to Beta...
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
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!
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
*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).
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.
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.
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]
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
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
IIRC, Altavista(originally altavista.digital.com) was just a little demo project used to show off the digital alpha systems that it ran on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't get it.
Oh, where is ObviousGuy when we need him?
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.
Shouldn't that be "I for 1.000000000317"? Or did they fix that bug?
(-1, reference to overblown P1 rounding errors)
- fader
Their plan to move everyone to itanic appears to have backfired. Has itanic finally sunk?
Stick Men
I for one, do. It runs on NetBSD on DEC Alphas. Dead OS on dead chips. :)
Windows is only $500 if your time is worthless.
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."
I am Pentium of Borg
Division is futile
You will be approximated
(stolen from a sig - circa Pentium I)
PowerPC architecture is probably more widely used than x86.
ARM architecture is VERY widely used.
M68k architecture is still used.
Just because desktops and servers don't use it doesn't mean it isn't used. For example, I worked on a program that sold ~2 million PowerPC chips per year. For one automotive module. How many Pentium 4s does Intel sell in a year? A lot, to be sure, but the number of chips used in embedded applications dwarfs that of desktops, and in the embedded arena there's still a ton of choice of architecture.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Then tey had the stupid idea and buddies decided to kick out Hewlett (who at least knew that the employee loyalty went both ways, and recognised the strength in their printers), and decided to , support Carly's silly idea of
1(HP) + 1(Compaq) + 1/2(Dec) = 0.95(HPQ)
which made them #1 for a very brief moment until they decimated themselves with the first major layoffs in cocmpany history making themselves #2 or worse in most things within a quarter or two after they were #1. Amazing that they try that hard to become #1 (which for some reason they pitched to investors as being more important than having a sustainable business), only to then trim themselves down to be #2 to save costs.
Turns out Hewlett was right in the ind. They were a great printer company, and if they ditch the Compaq crap and the random software that they bought and never used (remeber the "$470 million mistake in buying Bluestone"), they might become a great printercompany again.
Between Compaq&HP this should be a case study of how stupid executive decisions can kill a company. They had the best CPUs (Alpha, and PA-RISC), the best search engine (Alta Vista), etc. They could dhave been Intel+Google.
Now what the hell have they become? A more expensive(at least til they finish their layoffs)-than-Dell reseller of Wintel. God what an embarassment.
Bring back Walter Hwelett!!!! At least he rememberd and understood what HP once stood for.
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.
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.
Which 15 years? In the early years of the "IBM PC" architecture, Intel (which didn't have the manufacturing capacity it has today) directly licenced Harris, AMD, IBM, and Hitachi to make their own 808x/80286 chips. (Lots of IBM-brand computers had "IBM Inside", not Intel.) There were also the NEC V20 and V30 chips, which were unlicenced 808x clones. Then AMD, Cyrix, IBM, and TI all produced 386-equivalents, and then the whole slew of 486-alikes that prompted Intel to switch to the trademarkable "Pentium" name, while others sold similar "586" and "686" chips. Which brings us to the modern crop of AMD Athlons, Transmeta Crusoes, VIA C3's and such to which you referred. I'm not sure there was even a 15-month period in which Intel was the only source of x86-compatible CPUs.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Sorry. I said ONE PROGRAM. I.E. one specific module. That performed one specific function in an automobile. Not even a very big program. I work for someone who buys PPCs, not makes them - I have no idea what total sold is, but it dwarfs x86.
Most automobiles currently sold have at least 5 embedded processors in them. Some have upwards of 50. Very few of those (I've never even run across one, actually) are x86 architecture. The point is that while x86 may lay claim to the desktop, the desktop is an absolutely minimal part of the entire CPU market, and x86 barely even plays in that market.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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?
Maybe that's why some contries banned Apple's misleading advertising!
Best Buy can have you arrested
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.
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
He was talking about one product line. How many cars use Bosch Motronic? That's PowerPC. How many Fords? That's PowerPC. How many Cisco devices? How many Macs? How many GameCubes (and coming up, Xbox2/PS3/Next gen. Nintendo), how many other devices? How many PowerPC-based printers? And, well, you can count a few satellites and planetary probes.
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?!?
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.
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.
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.
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.
HP used to make a lot of cool tools as well - Oscilliscopes and such.
Their calculators were very cool
They were in at the begginning of the laser printer market. My Laserjet III is still going strong (did have to replace the power supply once but that was a job I could do myself with a screwdriver)
They have a pretty good claim to having invented the personal computer even though they never sold huge numbers since they were aimed at labs rather than end users. IBM can also put in a claim on that front with their APL desktop machine (HP's ran Basic or their own algebraic langauge, depending on model). We are talking early to mid 70's here.
They used to make PCs that you could run over with a truck - I know someone who did that on a loading dock and it kept on working.
And they made a cool range of mini-computers (although their OS and compilers were somewhat of a pain to use). In at least one of the early models you could actually add your own instructions using writable control store.
Squirrel!
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.
...-.-
Embedded PowerPC is doing pretty well these days, as the cost comes down. Somewhere else in the thread I mentioned working on a program that was using a couple million mid-high end embedded PPCs; there's definitely a place for them. OTOH, I just saw an article on a micro that, while it runs at 4 MHz and can't do much, costs 50c. Retail. On-chip crystal, too, so it really is single-chip, add power and ground. I think it has something like 256 bytes of flash and 64 bytes of RAM.
That's just neat. It's a 4 MIPS processor, and it costs about as much as the postage to mail it.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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
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...
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.
Umm... there's a difference between 2nd source and clone.
.09u. .13u, and will be using IBM for .09u.
Zilog's Z80 was a CLONE of the 8080.
AMD WAS a second-sourcer until the Am486.
Harris was a second-sourcer until the 386, at which point they dropped out.
NexGen? I thought they made the Nx586 and Nx686 (released as the AMD K6), never any Intel chips under license. They were fabless, and used IBM.
Cyrix? Same here. I thought they designed their own chips. They were fabless, though, so EVERY Cyrix chip was made by a CYRIX second-sourcer.
IBM both designed their own chips (Blue Lightning) and was a Cyrix and NexGen second-sourcer, and is going to be a VIA second-sourcer at
TI and ST were Cyrix second-sourcers.
IDT designed their own chips (it could be argued that Centaur ran almost completely seperate from IDT, that Centaur was fabless, but was funded by and used the fabs of IDT, but it's a real stretch, as they WERE owned by IDT).
VIA (well, Centaur) designs their own chips, and is fabless. They use TMSC for
TMSC is a VIA second-sourcer.
NEC was an Intel second-sourcer and designed their own chips (the V20 and V30).
I think I got it all in there...