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

Shouldn't they rename it

[Stop the war now!]

to "Omega" then?

Beta

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, sure took them a while to get to Beta...

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...

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: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.)

Re:Sad

[AKAImBatman]

What is really sad is you have not heard of the highly powerful, and successful AMD series of chips

You mean the one's BASED on Intel's architecture?

as the Motorola chip sets

No one uses Motorola's chips for PCs anymore. All of Apple's PowerPC chips come from IBM, and IBM uses its bigger cousin (the POWER chip) in its Unix servers.

Of course, I'm not a big IBM fan so I tend to have selective memory about those.

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.

Re:Sad

[drinkypoo]

AMD and intel processors do not share an architecture. AMD and intel have been making their own RISC-architecture x86-compatible processors (AMD is more RISCy than intel) since the K5 and Pentium, respectively. In particular the K6 is entirely RISC inside, with an emulator strapped on the front and back ends (fetch and restore.)

I think you mean the one based on intel's instruction set.

Of course, intel's new 64 bit processors are in turn based on AMD's instruction set...

Re:Sad

[SideshowBob]

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.

Re:Sad

[daveschroeder]

No one uses Motorola's chips for PCs anymore. All of Apple's PowerPC chips come from IBM, and IBM uses its bigger cousin (the POWER chip) in its Unix servers.

Actually, Apple gets all of the 74xx family (G4) chips - i.e., all PowerBooks, iBooks, current iMacs, etc...in other words, the majority of computers it sells - from Motorola (the semiconductor unit now being "Freescale").

Only the recent 75x (G3) and 97x (G5) family chips come from IBM, and Apple doesn't ship anymore G3-based machines.

Re:Sad

[4of12]

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

1. cheap,
2. standard and
3. 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.

Re:Sad

[grahamlee]

It's still the CPU to teach machine language or assembler on, and I even know people who are still using old SUN or similar-vintage workstations based on the m68k. The MC6809E CPUs also make good washing machine controllers, alledgedly.

Re:Sad

[Predius]

'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.

Heh

[Burgundy Advocate]

Isn't this the fourth or fifth time Alpha has died? Let it rest already!

Zombie Alpha needs brains, badly.

Niche guys....

[Chicane-UK]

Yeah, like that little known outfit called AMD. I know you might not of heard of them, but they do make some good chips ;) :)

Re:Niche guys....

[Anonymous Coward]

He meant intel architecture, you could argue that AMD64 is a new arch but it's still X86. What sort of nerd are you anyway?

Re:Niche guys....

[erikharrison]

Lets say x86 instead, and then the meaning becomes clear. The reason we say "Intel" when we mean "x86" is because, no matter how many other manufacturers make x86 chips (Via, AMD, and doesn't Unisys have there own x86 chip?) the technology is Intel's. All the other companies are niche players when it comes to controlling x86 technology. Via is for embedded, AMD is for price to power in the midrange market, and Unisys is x86 for mainframes.

The fact that AMD seems to be getting the upperhand in driving x86 technology doesn't change the fact that there is one technology which dominates the market, and everybody else either controls a nice slice with another technology, or competes with the major x86 player in a more specialized niche.

Alpha is dead, UltraSPARC is in doubt, and Via seems intent on shoving ARM out of the market. m68k is an abberation. There are two battles left. The battle of the archetecture (x86-64 vs POWER5/PowerPC), and the battle of x86 innovation (AMD vs Intel). That's sad.

Re:Niche guys....

[drinkypoo]

No it isn't. Stop repeating this garbage. AMD has been making their own RISC-internals processors since the K5. The K5 is not very RISCy, but the K6 certainly is, although both of these processors, as well as the K7 (Athlon) and K8 (Hammer) all emulate the x86 instruction set. The Hammer-core processors in particular do not resemble the cores of the older intel processors, or did you totally fail to notice the 16 externally-expressed 64 bit registers? Intel's cores meanwhile have also changed dramatically since the simple days of the 486 and they have many more registers than are directly addressable, and utilize register renaming (among many other techniques) to speed up execution.

Cost of the servers

[wolfemi1]

"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!

Re:Cost of the servers

[Kourino]

HP doesn't want people buying them, else they might realize that they perform better than comparitively- clocked Itanium kit :3

(Though to be fair, Itanium 2 was a lot better ... what's on the IA-64 roadmap, I wonder.)

AMD

[Snowdog668]

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.

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: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:Will anyone actually be *using* this?

[flaming-opus]

As it turns out many HP customers are refusing to migrate to itanium/hp-ux. When one is considering real server-iron the currentness of the processor is not always of utmost importance. If there's a legecy app that runs on tru64 (I mean ultrix, I mean osf) and it's really expensive to port, a lot of shops are just going to keep running alphas until the wheels fall off and burn. [Look at all the guys still running on sperry 1100-series machines]

True, it's a dead-end choice, but one that might limp along for another 6-8 years. Not everyone has the option of migrating NOW. That works if you're talking about tru64/apache to linux/apache, but not if your talking about tru64/Legecy-app-from-company-no-longer-in-busines s to anything else. A migration might cost millions of dollars. A dead-end alpha server might cost tens of thousands and put off the more for a long time.

My call is that makes lots of sense.

My Alpha Story

[Anonymous Coward]

*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).

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?

Wikipedia

[sometwo]

Here's the article about the alpha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha

Alpha Envy

[Neon Spiral Injector]

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.

ARM?

[nullset]

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]

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.

Slashdot History

[Lord Kano]

Slashdot ran for the first 7 or 8 months off an Alpha box.

If memory serves, Slashdot ran on a Multia.

LK

Re:Barely Knew Ya...

[jpmkm]

IIRC, Altavista(originally altavista.digital.com) was just a little demo project used to show off the digital alpha systems that it ran on.

AMD CPU's are using licensed Alpha tech

[Locutus]

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

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.

Microprocessor Report

[glassware]

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.

Re:Microprocessor Report

[javiercero]

Well the general idea for RISC according to Paterson came from having to program the microcode in the VAXen, so at some point they figured out that the translation overhead from the CISC instructions was unecesary. CISC came to be as a sort of "compresion" mechanism in which one instruciton could be fetched from memory and then it can be mapped into a sequence of micro-ops inside the CPU. Thus the intruction memory space and bandwidth requirements were substatial (afterall memory was a premium back then). People figured out that memory may get larger, so why not just fetch the microops themselves, so it was a trade off between memory footprint and decoding complexity.

Of course early designs like the CDC 6600 were pretty RISC, although they didn't know it. And the CISC came out as a solution to the memory footprint problems that such architectures poised (in scaling down from supers to minis where cost was a priority).

However it is really eye opening to know the actual translation overhead, control related with the translator in the x86 family is significant. And almost half of the dynamic transistor budget (not SRAM) goes into the translation/scheduling portion not the functional. So the overhead is much more significan than...

And yes their approach is microprogramming, except that RISC-core is more buzzword compliant :).

Re:Well

[fader]

Shouldn't that be "I for 1.000000000317"? Or did they fix that bug?
(-1, reference to overblown P1 rounding errors)

Re:Reminds me of CISC vs. RISC debate

[mihalis]

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.

Well, maybe. Intel is a big winner, but every single Pentium or Athlon is remarkably RISC inside. In fact these chips are so much more complex than any of the "pure" RISC or CISC chips the statement that CISC won is practically meaningless.

Which side does Out Of Order Execution come from? Intel did it fast first.

Who use OOOE now? Everyone.

Theres a huge laundry list of features in modern high-performance CPUs that do not fit into RISC vs. CISC. Trace cache, micro-ops, CMT, CMP, etc etc

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:Reminds me of CISC vs. RISC debate

[Kourino]

Pff, it's not that clear cut, as most people know.

Much of the lower level workings of "IA-32" chips are a lot more RISCy than they started out being. More complex instructions are implemented in microcode. On the flip side, architectures like PowerPC (and even SPARC ... register windows are neat, but not very RISC) aren't very RISCy at all compared with stuff like MIPS.

Neither side won absolutely. This is probably as it should be.

Re:Well

[avronius]

I am Pentium of Borg
Division is futile
You will be approximated

(stolen from a sig - circa Pentium I)

Re:amd is niche??

[Kiryat Malachi]

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.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

So what does HP do anymore. Once HP stood for a lot of great things, including loyalty to their employees (which reaped loyalty from their employees as a reward, and great printer products.

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.

Re:What's so bad about x86?

[turgid]

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.

Thanks to the ruthless intel vs. AMD competition of the last half decade, that is now the case, but it didn't used to be.

Back in the early '90s when the 64-bit RISC architectures were coming out, x86 was a joke. Now, Opteron is more or less a DEC Alpha with an x86 translation unit slapped on top and hypertransport, which made its way down from Cray, via the Sun E10k to the desktop.

If it hadn't been for these radical RISC architectures, and the intel vs. AMD fight, things would be very different.

Don't even think about multi-processor Xeon systems. The primitive bus architecture and interprocessor communications simply does not scale well at all past 2 processors. You can just about get away with 4 processors, but after that, you might as well just put space heaters in the box.

Nonsense, if you have an Alpha, move fast

[alexhmit01]

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.

Re:amd is niche??

[tverbeek]

the x86 stuff ... was a solely Intel offering for a very long time (close to 15 years, I think)

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.

Re:amd is niche??

[Kiryat Malachi]

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.

Just started our last lease VMS on Alpha's

[abcxyz]

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 wasn't management that failed, it was marketing

[lophophore]

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.......

Re:amd is niche??

[Cobalt Jacket]

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.

"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.

Re:"Niche guys"?

[Tassach]

What's wrong with x86?

In Two words: Little Endian

In Three words: Variable Length Instructions

The RISC guys had it right. So right in fact that even current x86 chips are RISC on the inside, and then waste close to half their transistor count on circutry that does nothing besides transform the x86 instruction set into something that isn't brainfucked. That Athlon-64 would cost half as much, draw half as much power, and generate half the heat if you ripped out the x86 emulation layer.

Re:"Niche guys"?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"The RISC guys had it right. So right in fact that even current x86 chips are RISC on the inside, and then waste close to half their transistor count on circutry that does nothing besides transform the x86 instruction set into something that isn't brainfucked. That Athlon-64 would cost half as much, draw half as much power, and generate half the heat if you ripped out the x86 emulation layer."

According to AMD and Intel comments, the translation circuitry is less than 5% of the total CPU. In fact, over half of the transistor count comes from L2 cache.

Re:"Niche guys"?

[vrai]

Because ...

1. Sun sell them, and everything that Sun sells costs far more than it should. A 1Gb memory upgrade from Sun would bankrupt many small countries.
2. The UltraSparc cost a lot to develop, but compared to IA-32 chips has a tiny market. Thus it doesn't benefit from the economies of scale that Intel/AMD have.

Re:"Niche guys"?

[akuma(x86)]

1) The Alpha is also little endian.

2) Complicated instruction decode can be removed from the critical circuit paths with pre-decoded caches. On one extreme, AMD uses predecode bits to mark where instructions begin in the i-cache. On the other extreme, Intel caches the fully decoded micro-ops in their trace-cache. When the variable length decode is out of the critical path, it can be made slower and therefore smaller.

I don't know where you get your "half" numbers from, but I can assure you that the x86 overhead is nowhere close to "half". There is MAYBE 5-10% overhead in power/area. Most of the non-cache transistors in modern x86 CPUs go towards the out-of-order control logic (re-order buffers, schedulers, highly-ported register files, memory ordering buffers etc...) which attempt to extract instruction level parallelism from the program. High performance CPUs need this logic whether they are RISC or not.

Another note -- Variable length instructions more efficiently encode your program so you don't need as big of an i-cache or as much bandwidth to the i-cache as a RISC processor. It's not all bad. Compile something on x86 and then cross compile it to some RISC processor and tell me how much bigger your binary is...

Instruction sets are not where performance comes from. Circuit technology and underlying microarchitecture are FAR bigger components to performance and how much power your chip burns.

Revisionist crap !!

[Macka]

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?

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 .. and NOTHING Intel, IBM or anyone else could product would have even come close to touching it. It wasn't any technology shortcoming that killed Alpha, just bad management heaped on bad management heaped on even more bad management.

Macka

Re:Reminds me of CISC vs. RISC debate

[dutky]

kbahey wrote:

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.

That's an odd take on history, unless by 'win' you actually mean: "all but one CISC architecture (Intel x86) eventually capitulated and either exited the field altogether (either adopting a new RISC architecture) or shifted to a niche (usually embedded) market."

A little history lesson for all you folks who either didn't exist or weren't paying attention in early days of the microcomputer revolution: Back in the late-seventies/early-eighties there were a fair number of competing architectures in both the mini- and microcomputer markets.

In the mini-computer world there were:

• DEC PDP-11 and VAX
• IBM S/360 and S/370
• Data General Nova and Eclipse
• Burroughs B5000
• Hewlett Packard HP3000
• and many others

all of which were CISC designs (relatively few registers, memory-to-memory arithmetic operations, lots of addressing modes, etc.).

In the microcomputer world there were:

• Motolorola's 6800 (8/16-bit) and 68000 (16/32-bit)
• National Semiconductor's 32000
• Texas Instruments TI9900
• Zilog's Z80 (and 16 and 32-bit successors Z8000 and Z80,000)
• Rockwell's 6502 and 65816
• and, of course, Intel's 8080 and 8086

all of which were, like the mini-computers of the day on which they were modeled, also CISC variants.

Ever since the mid-seventies, various research groups (at universities and major corporations) had been toying with ways to make architecturally faster computers. (that is, computers whose arrangement of registers and instruction set were inherently fast, rather than just rely on faster transistors and shorter busses for speed increases) A number of these efforts stumbled upon the same set of concepts:

1. eliminate all features that are not easily used by contemporary compilers
2. eliminate most addressing modes
3. eliminate memory operands for arithmetic and logical operations
4. eliminate variable length and variable format instruction encoding
5. eliminate micro-proramming of instructions (hardwire everything),and
6. break all instructions into parts that can be overalpped (pipelining)

This was dubbed Reduced Instruction Set Computing, or RISC, as a contrast to the contemporary architectural practices, which the RISC camp lumped together under the term Complex Instruction Set Computing, or CISC.

The RISC approach payed off pretty quickly with processors that could easily execute one instruction every clock cycle (CISC architectures tended to take many clock cycles per instruction) and a few commercial products appeared in the mid-eighties from MIPS, Clipper, AMD and IBM. The main complaints against the RISC approach came down to one of

1. fixed-width instructions waste too much memory
2. RISC instruction sequences are too difficult for assembly language programmers to understand, or
3. we can make better compilers that will be able to use CISC features to better advantage than do existing compilers (all we need is a measly little research grant and five more years).

In the end, however, all three arguments proved false (memory capacities followed Moore's law into the stratosphere, most everyone moved to HLL compilers, and the genius level optimizing compilers either didn't materialize or benefitted the RISCs just as much as they did the CISCs).

One by one, all the big players either came around to the RISC way to seeing things:

• Motorola and DEC dropped their existing CISC platforms and developed RISCs (M88k and

Half right.

[argent]

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.

Instruction sets have been marchitechted out.

[argent]

doesn't matter what the user visable instruction set is.

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 ... the ones that were once thought outrageously hot but now seem merely tepid, and heat is turning into the next bottleneck in processor design.

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.

R.I.P.

[arsine]

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

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.

X86 costs.

[JollyFinn]

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.