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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.
"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!
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
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?
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!
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]
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.
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
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.
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
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."
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.
---
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Stick Men
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/
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
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.
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
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:
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:
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:
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
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:
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.
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.