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Compaq Cutting... Alpha?
CuriousGeorge113 writes "As a result of Compaq's recent acquisition of
Digital Equipment, they plan on closing the
Salem, New Hampshire plant which employs 900
people. Most of them will be laid off. The plant currently
makes alpha-based server computers. "
In the article, it mentions that the alpha server production is being moved to two existing plants. One in CA and the other in TX.
BTW, a server farm of alphas running linux was used to create some of the special effects for Titanic and Los Alamos has a 140 node Beowulf of alphas running linux.
Did you read the story? No where does it say that compaq is giving up on Alphaservers. It states that compaq is consolidating alphaserver assembly to two existing plants in other parts of the country.
They are consolidating all alpha manufacturing in North America. See:0 17
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990517S0
This is likely a cost cutting move now that Pfeiffer is out.
A few important points:
In other words, this is nothing to worry about. Alpha is not going anywhere.
Kenneth C. Schalk ( kenneth.schalk@compaq.com)
Alpha Development Group, CAD & Test Technologies
Compaq is cutting costs. Their stock dropped like a rock when they announced they weren't going to make the expected profits last quarter (from a high near 50 to about 25). These layoffs to be expected since Compaq bought both Digital and Tandem. Part of the "problem" (as seen by stockholders and analysts) was that Compaq didn't downsize Digital and Tandem as quickly as many folks had expected. They are shifting manufacturing to Houston, TX (Compaq) and Fremont, CA (Ex-Tandem) just to cut costs. They can't survive if all they do is fight with Dell and everyone else over the sliver thin margins of the low-end PC market.
Compaq is sticking with the Alpha chip and don't expect them to drop it in the near future. It goes with their plans to establish themselves even more in the high-end server market. They expect to keep Tru64 (Dec Unix), Linux, and NT around so they can take advantage of whatever develops on the high-end side.
I feel sorry for the folks who are losing their jobs out in Salem, but it was just a matter of time once Compaq bought Digital.
- 0.25u 21264 (EV67) @ 800MHz by year-end.
- First 700MHz EV67 parts are expected to spec out at 30 SPECint95/base, 60 SPECfp95/base.
- 0.18u 21264 (EV68) @ 1GHz in 1Q00, spec at 50 int/85 fp.
- 0.18u 21364 (EV7) @ 1GHz by 4Q00-1Q01, expected spec 60 int/100 fp.
- EV8 expected 2002.
- EV9 and EV10 are in development.
That doesn't sound like dropping Alpha to me.Not quite anymore, actually. SGI spun off MIPS into its own company and is now building servers based on Intel chips with SGI-style motherboards running Windows NT, if I understand correctly.
MIPS was never spun off, because it was never *absorbed*. SGI purchased MIPS in the early 90s, and only recently divested all but 20% of its stake in the company.
The CPU division responsible for the Rx-thousand series CPU is internal to SGI now.
And, though SGI has announced NT server, it has yet to make any. Most of its sales still have RISC CPUs in them.
Don't put too much stock in those benchmarks. They don't actually measure scalability or enterprise readiness.
It is well known that among MCSEs that NT doesn't scale well past 3-4 CPUs. You need the far more expensive NTserver enterprise edition if you want to get up to eight on the Alpha and even then the performance scaling is nothing like linear. From the first tests coming out on the 8-way Penguin Computing systems, the 2.2.x kernel scales reasonably well on eight CPUs. The limiting factor on better scalability appears to be an I/O bottleneck after about six processors are utilized. Those tests were run using a database (Oracle?) to create the load, so perhaps with a less I/O intensive load such as rendering, the scalability would be even better.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
SGI spun off MIPS but they still use the MIPS processor in everything but their low end stuff. Sun doesn't own the SPARC plant but noone doubts their commitment to RISC. HP has always been dependent on Intel for CPU fab so its not suprising that they partnered with intel for their next generation CPU. They never had any intention of going with x86 CISC type CPUs. Most of the system Vendors have gotten out of the silicon business because the costs of remaining competitive are to high. Only companies that specialize in microprocessor fab can affor to invest $1billion everytime they want to upgrade their plant. Outsourcing your silicon fab makes economic sense, dumping your enterprise architecture for commodity consumer CPUs makes no sense at all.
If Merced were here now and faster than the Alpha, then maybe Compaq could justify making the switch, but current generation alphas are faster than Merced will be when it arrives.
As for HP's Merced moves that is a huge blunder.
They were telling their customers that in two years when Merced arrives it would be "just as fast" as the PA-RISC systems they use now. Yeah, throw out your infrastructure and buy a whole new architecture with no significant performance gains and fewr applications, that just didn't fly with the customers and HP eventually caught on.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
I work for a Compaq enterprise distributor. Compaq has increased support for and investment in Digital's Alpha product line across the board. The only products that were scuttled were low end x86 products that competed with more successful Compaq PCs. Where the Digital models were more innovative or popular they were rebranded as Compaq products.
Compaq cannot compete in the enterprise against Sun SPARCs, HP PA-RISC, IBM AS400s and RS6000s without Alpha based systems. This is why they have released eight new Alpha system models since they bought Digital and have invested heavily in the new Wildfire architecture.
By the way, Digital was making $14billion a year primarily on its alpha product line before it was bought.
As for cheap x86 compatible chips, I don't see AMD or Cyrix (or Intel for that matter) playing in the enterprise, Sun, IBM, HP and SGI all use Advanced RISC processors.
Just because you use a crummy little x86 CPU doesn't mean everyone should. That would be like Peterbilt getting out of the heavy truck business because more people buy minivans.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Actually I believe most Alpha's run either DEC/Tru64 Unix or linux.
Certainly the vast majority of Alpha machines that DEC/CPQ sell are sold with DEC/Tru64 licences. The figure I heard (from a very reliable source) was 85%. And that's just refering to workstations. I imagine the percentage for servers is even more heavily biased to Unix.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
all y'all alarmists should take an interest in the world around you. Compaq seems to have done more with Alpha than Digital ever did.
They're even porting their high performance Fortran compilers & math libraries to AlphaLinux.
NT Alpha may be keeping the chip on life suport right now, but, even though NT is stalled in the server market, Xeons (running various OSen) are continuing to infiltrate at alarming rates. I have no serious feelings about one architecture vs. another, only that the more the better, and that the only way to protect open standards is with heterogenous networks. One way to do this is to revive Alpha, and it won't happen unless Alpha throws in its lot with Open Source. The proprietary Unices are nice, but nothing they can do will make them stand out in a twenty-year-old, saturated market.
If Alpha runs Linux and *BSD really nicely, on the other hand.... They need to do what Intel's doing, giving help to the open OSen, but in a much bigger way. I hope Compaq has the commitment to do this in their current, risk-averse environment.
The Alpha fabs that Intel acquired and are bound to produce alphas on aren't that attractive. They are little more than a buffer for DEC/Compaq at this point. Samsung has taken the lead in manufacturing Alphas.
DEC had a services arm that Compaq absolutely coveted to compete against IBM. DEC was the only company going head to head with IBM in the large systems implementation services field.8 0617S0007
http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?IWK199
Compaq has been foundering since though...Margins falling on PC's etc.
About a decade ago, Digital laid off about the same number, maybe more, at their Sanders plant in Nashua. It was one of the causes of the 1991-2 recession in New Hampshire and is said to have cost Bush a ton of momentum and helped Clinton get some name recognition. About 20% of my friends' dads were out of work as a result of that downsizing. With Cabletron on the skids as well, doesn't sound like a good time for tech in New Hampshire...
Guys - honestly. As far as I know, Salem was just a machine assembly plant - Comapq probably has 10 of them, and they want to start centralizing. The acutal Alpha chip is still made, by Intel, no less, at a large plant in the suburbs of boston. Check out http://www.unix.digital.com/ sometime. Compaq is betting on the Alpha bigtime - they want to fill the enterprise with ProLiant's and AlphaServers. They are also betting on Tru64 UNIX (read: Was Digital UNIX) big time. Compaq is just trying to save a couple bucks while firing up for the big game.