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

[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.

Heh

[Burgundy Advocate]

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

Zombie Alpha needs brains, badly.

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 ;)

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?

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.

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: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.

"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.

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.