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Ixnay WinNT on Alpha
Thanks to Jason Perlow for sending us the
story that Compaq has laid off roughly 100 engineers responsible for WinNT on the Alpha platform, and will be not be doing more development on it. It's an interesting development, especially taken in light of Compaq's recent push with Linux, True64, and OpenVMS as the OSes (OSi?) of choice with the Alpha platform.
Um, tell me, how many alphas were sold with VMS on them?
Ungh
So where does the second "i" in virii come from?
Oh, let me guess...
1 virus, 2 virii, 3 viriii, 4 viriv...
If you are going to grammar-flame, make sure you at least know your grammar...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
TedC
Yea, I think he works directly as a Linux International promoter... But I bet he still has contacts ;-) and I can't think of anyone else who could get a couple 21264's to the gcc guys, can you? If so, feel free to beg em ;-) couldn't hurt.
The guys being let go were working on the 32-bit version of NT. 64-bit NT for Alpha is still proceeding.
Amen to that..
;-)
but i'd also like to add that it should be about time that people see that Compaq's aren't that good.. at least in my feeble opinion. Then again, put linux on it, and the world's a better place.
Insert mind here.
Well, they just cut one of their Alpha divisions, so you can't possibly take this as a good sign for the Alpha--but it's hard to consider this meaningful since they only cut support for 32-bit NT. 64-bit NT on Alpha is still being developed. Always remember to take what Hemos posts with a grain of salt.
Part of the FTC's complain required DEC to give Samsung and AMD access to the Alpha technology. Also INTEL DID NOT BUY THE ALPHA. They simply bought a Digital fab, and they settled their (I & D) patent disputes. BUT, Samsung still produces the chips independently from the Intel-Digital deal. The Alpha engineers, as I understand, now work for Compaq, Samsung, or API.
But, the only thing we found was for Tru64, so the "chiefs" decided to get some more SGI's, and keep the commercial UNIX problems all with one company. :-( I do know for a fact though, that if the preformance (espically FP w/ Fortran) would have been there from a commercial Linux compiler, not only would there be a Alpha Linux box here, but a couple PIII's running Linux too. For pure hardware preformance, there would have been a lot of nice hardware we could have got for the price of the Origin and Octane we got insted.
In the end, brand loyalty won, because it came down to a risk on something unknown, with questionable preformance from unknow compilers, compared to knowing how SGI would screw us already. As for Linux developed with a commercial compiler I say YES! I have long been a believer that people who don't optimize thier compiles, but go out and spend $700 more for a CPU that runs 20% faster are total idiots! It depends much on if the distribution was put together with the compiler, or if the compiler is included, and the price tag. Actually, I have thought about this for over a year now, and I think it was last summer some time I came to this conclusion:
"If someone is selling a C compiler for Linux, and they claim it is better than GCC, why in the world don't they bundle it with a whole Linux distribution that was compiled with thier compiler?"
If in fact the preformance was better, you may well be able to spend say $100 to $300 on a commercial compiler, and get a system that was 35% faster overall. I mean, even GCC can make your system up to 30% faster if you use the right flags (see my tests and the claims of Mandrake Linux). People are always looking for the latest greatest hardware boosts for an edge, and it's very short sighted to think about spending all that money on faster hardware when you have the source code right in front of you, and your runing unoptimized binaries.
If Intel REALLY wanted to support Linux, they would port thier compiler to Linux (which is an OUTSTANDING C compiler for x86), and let VAResearch sell Red Hat recompiled optimized for each specific CPU using Intel's compiler. They would probably see a preformance boost that they can't get out of hardware alone.
Along those lines, I also believe that AMD should really start backing the GCC project by donating half a dozen of thier new Athlon processors to the top developers in GCC. If they did that, and shiped instruction set specs and details, there could be a -march=athlon flag that could potential put thier preformance WAY ahead of PIII.
I'm also hoping that IBM pays some close attention to GCC now that they are supporting the Linux community, with the G3 and the older Cyrix based stuff they still own, they could really make Linux on thier hardware "wake people up."
Don't get me wrong, I think GCC is doing pretty darn well. But I do think that GCC development and support is much more important than elevating Linus to the level of a god.
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The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
Let's write this down. OS/2 survived WinNT on Alpha!
No, it doesn't make NT single platform, since Alpha is still being supported in the 64-bit version of win2k... I'm not sure about the current status of PPC, but I think MIPS/NT is dead--then again, MIPS is pretty much dead outside of video game consoles anyway.
"He may not've, but his OSes were guilty of running far too much in real mode when the '286 came out. And wasn't he the one who said "640k should be enough for anyone"?" You make the operating system that serves the needs. It is sad, but it is very true that DOS filled the needs at the time. As per the statement of Mr. Gates regarding 640KB: This has got to be the most ridiculous thing that the anti-Microsoft cult rehashes over and over again. Lets see some quotes of what Linus was saying at the same time ("Girls stink! I'm gonna eat candy forever!").
The Micros~1 Trolls on Slashdot can't start an intellectual debate and are slowly fading into irrelevance. Good to see them sinking with their own ship.
Can someone explain to me why they would like to kill of Alpha? I mean, isn't the Alpha processor what Intel is dreaming of when they are creating Merced?
I will never understand marketing. Why did Compaq buy Digital anyway? It sure smells like when SGI bought Cray.
Microsoft has ported Windows CE to maybe a dozen (??) processors. I heard a rumor that in the next version of Windows CE ("Rapier", the Palm Pilot "killer"), Microsoft will try to pawn off porting to third-party vendors. The hardware vendors will have to spend the time+money to port+test Windows CE on their processor. Microsoft has never liked to touch hardware. This seems like a risky move, though, considering the Windows CE is supposed to be widely supported on different processors.
Plus is most definitely derived from Latin...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
So Compaq/Digital sells more Alphas running NT than Tru64? Compaq doesn't get a damn thing from OS sales on NT/Alpha, whereas DU licenses are sometimes more than the boxes themselves. There's no way they're giving that up.
cheers,
-o
The people who they're trying to sell Alpha systems to and the people who buy Celerons to run overclocked in dual boards are generally not the same people.
And anyway, to get close to, say, an XP1000 at 667MHz, you need a quad 550MHz PIII Xeon (and that is assuming your task scales to at least 80% on four processors), so at those performance levels, price/performance for the Alpha is better than for Intel (quad Xeon boxes are very expensive).
I'm not real clued-in on Microsoft's plans for 64-bit support, but I am starting to wonder if Windows 2000 may have some timing issues.
:)
I've worked with the Betas a little bit. Of course, they were all designed for 32-bit x86 architectures.
I have to think that the base code in Windows 2000 is for 32-bit machines. I'm sure the option is there to quickly convert to a 64-bit version, but how do you "quickly" convert tens of millions of lines of code from 32 to 64 bit?
I'm not sold on this business of "64-bit ready". The OS is either 32-bit or 64-bit, period. If I'm using Win2000 on a Xeon and decide to upgrade to a Merced next year, I am sure I will need "Windows 2000 64-bit Intel Edition" to get the most out of the new hardware. I am also sure that there will be a new license to pay for.
Therein lies the rub. Why purchase a license for a 32-bit system when you plan on going 64-bit in the next 18 to 24 months? I can get along ok with NT 4 sp x until then. I also avoid any version 1.0 bugs this way.
So, why does Microsoft even bother making Win2000 run on 32-bit machines? Why not start out 64-bit? This is especially true if you are targeting the "enterprise" market and their high-end go-fast servers. No more 32-bit Intel/64-bit Intel/64-bit Alpha codebase issues. You're left with just Alpha and Merced versions and they're both 64-bit.
I guess Merced was too far off when they started and they didn't think it would take this long to release Win2000. When you start seeing the articles on "Why buy Win2K 32-bit?", just remember you heard it from me, Anonymous Coward, first.
.. available on the internet !
Perhaps your not familiar with the Alpha market. Where I work we sell tons of Tru64 Unix Alphas, a suprising number of OpenVMS Alphas and darned few NT alphas. Lately we've seen a lot of demand for Linux on the Alpha platform as well. The profit margin on the NT systems is terrible too. In short Compaq is having trouble giving NT away and customers are lining up in droves for Unix oriented solutions. If compaq were to discontinue Alpha then they would have to discontinue their tandem line since future Himalaya systems are designed around Alpha. At that point Compaq throws away something like $15billion in recent aqcuisitions, admits they don't have what it takes to play in the enterprise, has nothing to differentiate themselves from Dell and risks Lawsuits from the worlds largest banks who expect decades long support and upgrade paths for their Tandem hardware.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
You know, is there any way that Digital could make the alpha-nt source available to the public? I know, it's a crazy idea, and I'm almost positive that MS would have fits over it.. but is it possible they made an oversight and Digital could release it?
This is the reason free software can be so beneficial - alpha-NT would have continued unhindered if it had a developer base independent of the company. Now it's just going to sink for no reason other than economics. :/
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Since when.
This is the same company that...
In 1993 we purchased a 1 gig RZ58 drive for our DECstation 5000/200. Six months later it failed, they gave us another RZ58. Six months later that one failed, they gave us another RZ58. Six months later that one failed as well.
About that time we were able to replace the machine with an Alpha 3000/300. That wasn't too bad of a machine, but it didn't have the I/O of the DECstation.
A few years later I'm at a client who has decided to migrate from Netware 3.1 to NT4. This is late 1996. They purchased five Alphastation 4000 machines.
We spent 3 months there trying to get the machines to run reliably. They wouldn't. We had processor failures, fan failures, drive failures, etc. etc. etc. Put too hard of a load on the RAID controller the PCI bus would shutdown...
DEC knew we had five of these machines and had only one in production use. So when a component would fail, they'd tell us to take one off one of the spare machines until they could get a replacement... two weeks later.
Uhh, the machines were supposed to come with 24 hour turnaround on failed components.
Then a friend of mine who works at a university that has used DEC exclusively was telling me that they ordered about 100 of the Alpha stations just last year prior to Compaq buying out the company. They arrived, but not one of them had a functional serial port.
DEC had to come out and replace the motherboards on all 100 machines.
I'm sorry, DEC's support was one of the worst in the business. If anything Compaq has improved it, it couldn't get any worse... nor could the quality of their hardware.
Properly speaking, it's octipodes, and the formant ipus is legit, from Gk. p(o)us, foot, as in Oedip(o)us.
Viri is correct Latin pl., virus, -i, masc. poison, slime) but the word has been naturalized. BTW Viri is also nom.pl. for "men". Many charming mistranslations from my young lady students based on this...
First of all, every news source that I've seen (except for ZDnet, surprise surprise), has stated that Compaq isn't ending their Win64-Alpha development, only their Win32-Alpha support. Anyone who's bought an NT-Alpha box anytime recently isn't stuck at a dead-end -- if they want to upgrade, they'd move to Win64 when it's available and get themselves a nice performance boost since NT/Win would finally be utilizing the 64-bit architecture.
As for your point about Intel, they don't have Microsoft by the balls, because on the server end, Intel is struggling to get their 64-bit architecture to work. At this point, it's anybody's guess which will come out first: Win64 or Merced. As for the x86-compatible end, Intel potentially has a huge battle on its hands against AMD.
Lastly, Microsoft has very close relations with Compaq. If Compaq's move were going to jeopardize Microsoft, Microsoft easily has enough money to invest in Compaq to make sure that this particular division (NT-Win32-Alpha) stays afloat. You don't think Compaq actually announced this move without discussing it with Microsoft, do you?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Makes perfect sense to me. Why continue to support an OS that has a pretty big competitor and that you've never gained much market share on? Why would a customer choose an Alpha NT box, with possible application support, instead of an Intel/AMD NT box with more applications?
Maybe they're getting out of NT to give AMD a chance at it? Nah, couldn't be.
The Unix and Linux camps are less taken in by Intel's marketing, and are more likely to try alternative solutions. Anyways, it's a possibility!
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
We'd had an annoying time with Compaq's Intel boxes
First, I've never had a problem with anything made by Compaq (except for their consumer-level stuff, which is about the same as anybody else's.) I am writing this on a (circa) 1995 Deskpro that has never had any hardware problems at all.
and their crappy dealer-based sales system
As opposed to Digital's dealer-based sales system?
(yes, Digital had dealers, just like Compaq.. and the only thing required to become one was a PO from a customer worth $15000 or more.)
I'm sorry to hear about your problems with Compaq, but in truth, my experiences with Digital (pre-Compaq) are just as bad - how about a hard drive that failed, and Digital doesn't have any to replace it - so they said "we've got that on back-order right now, we expect stock in 3 to 6 weeks." _FIVE MONTHS LATER_ our hard drive arrived.
I for one welcomed the purchase by Compaq.
Our top programmer gave us a talk explaining that "NT" had originally stood for N10 ("N-ten")
Your programmer was wrong. NT stood for "New Technology" - as in "not Windows 3.x" - it came from a new codebase, whereas the old (3.x) code stemmed from what was just a graphical shell (no multitasking, networking, memory management, etc..)
:) btw, this is good news.. bout time vendors realized the power of linux and how crapping win really is
I read a "Ask Bill" column where Mr Gates denys having made the remark about 640KB.
Remember when everyone feared that Compaq after taking Digital would dump alpha and unix in favor of wintel? My how thing changed
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Geekdom is even fond of completely wrong forms,
as we can probably see. I have a friend who actually took Latin in school but insists that the plural of "Unix" is "Unixii".
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Wonder what my old company is going to do? They announced they were going to can the DUX (Tru64) port of their software, but keep the WinNT Alpha port. And they had a bunch of Alpha workstations lying around.
UGS was betting that Compaq would nuke the Tru64 division and that NT was the future, but it looks like they were wrong. (Maybe they'll send me all the now useless workstations....)
:):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):) :):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):):) :):):):):):)
Why kill NT/Alpha?
32bit support due to a trick, NT use only 32bit of the adress space (the first and last 2gb of the 64bit using sign extension). That is due to the number of DWORD in Win32 API that are used to pass pointers (HWND (windows structures) are DWORD, as well as many others things).
Lack of application for NT/Alpha, there is FX!32 (run NT/Intel binaries), but even if it's fast it's still emulation.
If you'd have to run a big server would you use WinNT/Alpha or Tru64? (Note: I have an Linux#Alpha machine) Intel processor are still best price/performance and adequate for most servers.
During the initial/middle stages of the buyout, internal purchasing of PC's was such a brain fart, we almost had to call Dell. Production was so busy looking for other jobs that they couldn't get a PC out the door or too lazy to figure out how we could purcahse.
I'm already getting my life preserver on to jump ship. It is a pathetic company to work for full of poor management decisions and blunders they try to hide with fancy press releases full of fluff. The place is full of short sightedness. Every where you look: stupid decisions. The managers of internal app. development are so concerned about having the almighty "control" and to play "the game" that they fail to realize and produce what their users actually need.
The internal memo's from Ciceri & Capella are probably the worst things you have ever seen. Back in highschool I wrote crap like that (ya know, browsing the thesaurus to bloat your essay to get the full word count) and anyone with an IQ over 2 can see through it. I don't know how they can honestly send out that filth. They probably don't even realize how dumb it actually sounds and are caught up in their own self-importance or trying to sound as if they actually know what eBusiness is...some of it reminds me of Homer Simpsons' "HyperMegaGlobalNet". If bullshit were art, they would put da Vinci to shame.
Compaq isn't actually a company. It is a monkey training organization for PHB's. They learn how to re-org, play politics and kiss ass (Sorry to rant about it again). They spend 60% of their time figuring out how to re-organize the company's structure without actually doing anything....but it looks mighty fine in a press release doesn't it? Makes it look like they know what they're doing.
Remember, CPQ isn't all about PC's. They have a huge Services arm (inherited from DEC).
--CPQ contract AC
With thier acqusition of DEC and Linux becoming a viable alternative, why pay Microsoft so you can ship NT. Especially when M$ does none of the work to get it to run on Alpha.
It looks to me like Compaq is looking to reduce system costs in the server area. Particularly in the lower end of the market an OS like NT makes up a significant portion of a systems total cost. Especially in the user license area.
Maybe M$ went and increased the licensing cost for W2K.
Then again it could just be they are cutting out an area of the business that just did make much money.
Well, to be fair both MS and IBM thought DOS was going to be dead meat under 286+ machines and attempted to replace it. Of course, the replacement, OS/2, was a disaster until about 1992. Then someone at MS figured out that they could kluge a protected mode extender onto DOS and tell IBM to screw themselves, and most PCs are still running with that solution (Windows) to this day, making everyone's head hurt.
On the other hand, load up WP 4.2 and Lotus 1-2-3 2.x -- You can still get a lot of work done with 640K.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Kind of amusing, when you consider that Compaq and MSFT have been together for many years.
...
Guess that means W2K/WNT is not doing as well as Bill G would have us believe
Will in Seattle
Wasn't IBM's big mistake putting the 384K ROM space at the top of real memory, instead of the bottom? My understanding is that IBM did it this way only because that's how Apple did it (top 16K of the ]['s 64K.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Will Compaq dare to stop supporting Windows and NT on x86? Probably not, too much of a cash cow. Why would they bother to stop supporting NT on Alpha? If Compaq/Digital stops supporting NT on Alpha, then they will piss off The Giant (Microsoft). Considering that Compaq sells (hmm.. lets see) x86 and Alpha computers, will Microsoft still help Compaq sell Windows on x86? Seems like Compaq is risking losing Windows $$$ on both its Alpha and x86 product lines!
cpeterso
Intel has finally succeeded in developing some kind of remote mind-control device.
They've obviously been testing it for years at Motorola, but this excercise proves they've perfected it.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
BZZZZT!
:).
Wrong! "Bus" is short for "omnibus", which is certainly Latin
I think that chip you're talking about is the 21164PC chip, in 164sx boards. It runs any OS you like (DU, Linux, NT, FreeBSD, maybe OpenBSD, probably NetBSD), but I think they were aiming it at the NT market. It has some MMX/Altivec like instructions on the chip, which, as far as I can tell, has never been given software support..
Runs Linux like a champ, although I'm going to DU pretty soon.
cheers,
-o
640K barrier was nto Bill's fault. IBM decreed the 640K limit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
People known to be working on getting GCC working better on Alpha are: Richard Henderson, David Mosberger, Catherine Moore. If you think any OS that uses GCC is something you would like to support, thank these people, and the others at GCC/EGCS, they are the ones that will give you the freedom to run something other than WinNT and Tru64 on your Alpha.
Completely
Obscure
Messy
Proprietary
And
Quirky
Now that Compaq is on the ropes, all I need is a good Acronym for DELL.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Alpha NT is the smallest fraction of Alpha business and the least profitable. NT sales were third behind both Tru64Unix and OpenVMS and rapidly sliding to fourth behind Linux. Unfortunately NT support gave Alpha a reputation as a competitor with x86 when its really targeted at Sun UltraSPARC and SGI MIPS/IRIX markets.
You never hear anyone say 'its too bad that SPARC doesn't support NT, they could have some real market share if they did' or 'Gee AS400 is doomed since it only runs some minicomputer OS and not NT'.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
"Over 100 souls and their families are having their lives torn asunder because they did a great job and made NT on Alpha the only alternative to Intel's monopoly."
We are talking about NT here. The "Microsoft Monopoly". Like they can't go and work for some other company and make good money? They have a good understanding of alternative architectures and NT. Why not just move on, maybe work on getting NT to work smoothly w/Merced (another 64 bit processor)?
MS/IBM Lan Manager (Also resold by 3Com as 3Open or something) was an OS/2-based product which failed to gain much significant marketshare. It would be long forgotten, except that Windows NT uses the same networking layer.
It certainly works very differently from NetWare, for one it ran NetBEUI and NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP. If you wrote your DOS app on the LanMan APIs, you're pretty much stuck on either DOS, OS/2, or Windows. (These were the days before 'WinSock' - APIs were pretty much NOS-specific.)
I think the guy's concern is that they is no NetBEUI support in Linux, and the MS DOS TCP/IP software cuts pretty significantly into your 640K.
(One solution might be to look at the book "Unauthorized Windows 95" by Andrew Schulman . In the book he describes how to use Win95 to create a 32-bit version of DOS, complete with protected mode networking.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I should point out the Microsoft C compiler for NT is based on the Compaq compiler, so compiler performance is quite good. In fact, the NT SPECint95 baseline results are in some cases marginally better than the Tru64 ones.
OpenVMS obviously uses optimised Compaq compilers too.
But, yes, the Microsoft C compiler shows well on NT/Alpha SPEC benchmarks. Problem is, most of the common binaries are FX!32 emulation. But, for people working with source, NT/Alpha is a decent choice. I only wish GCC was as good for Alpha.
So, for example the scientific community or number crunchers who write thier own code can benifit from NT/Alpha, but people who rely on commercial software for things like graphics, sound, video, database, etc, don't get that benifit, and NT/Alpha isn't that great a choice (unless, of course, they get NT/Alpha native commercial binaries).
Blimey, that wouldn't be the same David Cutler who's currently heading Microsoft's 64-bit Windows development on Alpha and IA-64, would it?
Of course it would. Compaq have stopped developing 32-bit NT on Alpha, which makes perfect sense with 64-bit NT on the horizon (and what do you think it's being developed on, eh?).
NT has always been a modified microkernel architecture, just like every other commercial OS which is based on a microkernel. Pure microkernels are hopelessly slow, owing to message-passing overhead and poor locality.
64-bit Windows is slated to run on Alpha and IA-64, so I'm not quite sure what you mean by hardware-specific. At any rate, regardless of how many active ports there are, NT is still a fundamentally hardware-independent architecture. The lack of support for a wide variety of architectures is down to economic, not technical, reasons.
Er, how many commercial UNIXes are multiplatform?
Non-commercial systems can support any number of platforms, but commercial systems can only support those that turn a profit.
The IA-64 port might make it in time for the holiday season in 2003, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Me, I'm still waiting for the real Cairo to please stand up! (Note: Alpha is dead, at least for NT. There may be a release but I'm sure no one will use it!)
Damn, that's one of the funniest things I've ever read on Slashdot.
According to the OED, it's Latin, c. 1400, plural viruses
Yup. Realised that as soon as I went to check. Someday I really should get used to doing that first :)
If they had gone with Linux (I know it was a reach in '95) they could'a just picked up and dropped everything on Linux/Sparc, Linux/PPC, Linux/Intel, Linux/m68k, Linux/ARM, Linux/... Alpha, or not, Microsoft, or not, your business is at risk when running propriatary platforms.
At the university where I work, we were unfortunately committed to NT quite a while back - mainly because we had built a lot of custom code on top of MS Lan Manager on Netbeui.
We'd had an annoying time with Compaq's Intel boxes, and their crappy dealer-based sales system, and their pathetic support, so when we wanted some new high-end kit to run NT we happily bought DEC Alphas because the were big and fast and made by DEC, who had always supported us well with our DECStations/Microvaxen etc. This was about 1994 I suppose.
At the time, NT was more multiplatform than Linux (eek!) as it ran on Intel, Alpha, MIPS and PPC. Our top programmer gave us a talk explaining that "NT" had originally stood for N10 ("N-ten") a prototype chip that never went into production.
You can imagine our feelings, some years later, when DEC (good service) was bought by Compaq (terrible service by half-trained teenagers).
Recently we had a dodgy ethernet card on one of our NT Alphas, so our Compaq dealer, three days later, sent out a witless fool who half-overwrote the BIOS and left it unbootable for another day.
So now there will be no NT/Alpha expertise left within the useless parent company either.
If we could remote-boot (via BOOTP) into DOS 7 with a small-memory-footprint net client that could see a SAMBA server, we'd dump this rubbish and never pay a penny for NT again. But sadly, only a NETBEUI-based client is small enough at the moment.
george
Healthy operating systems, such as Linux, support more and more architectures over time.
On the other hand, Windows NT supports fewer and fewer architectures over time.
Let me know when Andy Grove gives a public demonstration of Windows NT running on a Merced simulator.
Not that benchmarks are really very relevant, but the Alpha 21264 at 667MHz beats a PIII Xeon 550MHz by nearly 4x on SPECMark, and a 600MHz Athlon by about 2.5x. I'd say that's a pretty significant speed advantage.
Yeah man, and if I can't run powerpoint and norton tools and after dark on my AS400 it can't be any good either. ,and industry analysts for that matter, view server products through desktop blinders. Most of the apps available for the desktop are useless or at least wasted on a server oriented system. Admittedly NT on Alpha is not a very big seller, but the market it aims at is the SQL/Exchange/Webserver market, not the desktop productivity market.
I think too many slashdotters
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Alpha floating point performance simply mass murders everything else out there. We're talking like _400%_ improvements over the fastest Intel stuff available.
Not so fast folks. Compaq have not made any statements about the end of NT or Alpha, and the reality of the layoffs is quite different from the press spin on it.
.18 micron shrink is in the works (possibly with copper interconnects) which will have two benefits. 1) a significant leap in MHz, way over the 1GHz milestone. 2) A significant reduction in price (smaller die = more per wafer). When Merced ships Alpha will be significantly faster, smaller and cheeper! Alpha still rules the 64 bit roost, and nothing else in the 64bit market looks like getting anywhere close to it in price/performance.
The engineers layed off worked on the NT4 port to Alpha. That is done and dusted, there is no more work to be done in that field now. The next Alpha NT move is to Win64, and that port is being developed and driven entirely in-house at Microsoft.
NT is not dead on Alpha. If Windows 2000 scales as well as Microsoft are predicting, and the Win64 Alpha version gets finished as planned, then a lot of companies are going to be very interested in combining this with the horsepower Compaqs imminent Wildfire (Alpha) platform provides. If anything it will put NT Alpha in more direct competition with big UNIX systems, an area of competition it's been denied so far due to NT's lack of scalability.
Alpha also has a very rosey future. A
This story about the end of Alpha NT is just that, a story. Pure press fiction and FUD.
Macka
Glory? Credit? Those don't buy a new mercedes. Surely DEC got proper credit in the form of money for their work?
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Compaq bought Digital because their service organization is large, experienced, well trained, and has a great reputation in the enterprise.
The Alpha is just a nice plus, but if you combine the Alpha architecture with the Tandem technology acquired around the same time, that's a pretty damn nice platform for running Tru64 or Linux.
Compaq is really gearing the Alphas over toward Linux and W2k while staying with Tru64 on the enterprise. I think you'll be surprised hwo well Linux runs on the new Alphas, and how many people are supprting that effort.
Is why anyone would have bought an Alpha-based machine, and then crippled it with NT.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
See the Boston Globe for details.
Here's the most interesting part:
Alpha can't be dumped. OpenVMS depends upon it (since the VAX platform is being EOLed), and Tandem NonStop will be transitioned to Alpha soon. Aside from being one of Compaq's biggest profit centers, several industry sectors rely heavily on OpenVMS and could not function without its reliability and scalability.
All this move means is that NT on Alpha simply hasn't taken off, largely because few ISVs provided Alpha builds of their products.
Intel can't touch the performance of todays EV67 generation Alpha, and won't really come close if/when Merced is released. Go ahead, show me an Intel box that even comes close to the performance of a DS20. You can't...
According to Terry Shannon, editor of the newsletter Shannon Knows Compaq, NT systems constitute a very small percentage of of the installed base of over 500,000 Alpha systems. Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS Alpha each have bigger installed bases.
Compaq sells far more Tru64 on Alpha than NT on Alpha. Compaq sells larger more expensive systems with tru64 than with NT and Compaq makes far more profit from Tru64 than NT. Hell, all of those statements apply to VMS versus NT. NT was supposed to be a Volume leader for Alpha. It has not been one. Compaq has not ended support for NT on Alpha all they have done is laid off some programmers working on NT 4.0. Development on 64bit Windows2000 continues at Microsoft under the direct supervision on David Cutler who uses a quad processor Alpha as his primary development platform. Compaq has more muscle with MS than DEC did and is able to get MS to support more of the development workload. Its is theoretically possible that Compaq may choose not to support Win2000 some time in the future if the market were to shun that OS, but for the time being Compaq still supports NT and still plans to support Win2000 when it becomes available.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Does this make NT single platform again?
> those people working to get Service Pack 6 [of
> Windows NT 4] out the door. Over 100 souls and
> their families are having their lives torn
> asunder because they did a great job and made NT
> on Alpha the only alternative to Intel's
> monopoly."
I find it strange that they would bring up Intel's alleged monopoly because a company fired some programmers programming one of four or more possible operating systems on the Alpha. Did Intel get in their and help pack these guys out? Microsoft is too lazy/incompetant to write for anything but Intel (not only did they not take primary leadership in NT on Alpha, but they dropped projects to port NT to MIPS and PowerPC) - is that Intel's fault? The way I read it is these guys were working on a dead end 32bit solution for a fine piece of 64bit hardware and Compaq got smart and cut their losses.
Additionally, why should Compaq fund labor that ultimately goes to Microsoft's credit? Microsoft wasn't in there doing the port. They were Compaq employees doing Microsoft's job for them, and guess who was going to hog all the glory? Compaq did these guys a favor by firing them - now they'll get real jobs working on projects with a future and just maybe get credit for their work. If Microsoft wants to port to other platforms, they should do it themselves - hell, the free Operating System that they claim to be their competitor in court but of no concern publicly has ports to several platforms done by Linux developers for Linux. Why can't a multi-billion dollar corporation get off their duff and do the same thing? Bah - just use Linux. To hell with everything else... (well, except BeOS, Solaris, FreeBSD and a few others...)
I have been using Debian on a 21164A for the past year and I have to say that i have not run into any of the problems you allude to except for a few issues that can be traced directly to the kernel. (Pat on the back to the Debian development team).
In response to your comments on GCC, I agree with you wholeheartedly. GCC does not produce fast code on the Alpha platform.
However there is about to be an option. Compaq is porting their fortran and C compilers to Linux as we speak. The Fortran Compiler is already out in beta release and it is a dream. I have achieved at least a 2X speedup using the same code and as much as 5X depending on what I am working with. If the C compiler is nearly this good I'll be hooked.
This brings me to an interesting question. I Strongly doubt that Compaq will ever release the source code for these compilers. For me this is not an issue because I'm not really up to compiler development and for in house scientific applications speed is the only concern. However, what do you people think about using these compilers for developing linux distributions? If there is a significant advantage to using this technology on alphas running linux will people continue to stick with egcs/gcc?
This wasn't because of the alpha proc but instead because of the respective bios on the motherboard. There have been many work arounds released since then.F /...
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
21whuzza64? Never heard of it. 64 bit processors haven't been developped yet! Just like MS has yet to invent the first true pre-emptive multitasking OS.
Damn, this "plural of Virus" thing needs to be in the slashdot faq.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
David Cutler, along with a crew of people that he brought over from DEC. Somewhat ironic don't you think.
Compaq sells way more Unix and more VMS than NT on the Alpha. You're right about the profit though. Far more profitable to sell Unix and VMS than NT. I don't think Compaq is going to discontinue NT support any time soon though.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
It makes sense. Why should Compaq (currently stuggling) fund NT development on the Alpha, when Microsoft has billions of dollars in the bank? NT's only claim on the high-end was the Alpha: If they loose it, they loose even more prestige. If they don't want it, why should Compaq waste their time trying to force it anyway?
:-)
Now, the Alpha may be loosing its edge, what with AMD's Athlon at 650 MHz and doing well in performance, but the Alpha is still a much cleaner design then anything Intel-ish. And Merced seems to be turing into yet another extension to the x86 line, instead of leaving the 8086 behind in 1969 like it originally was going to. But that is another story...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Digital had an awesome Field Service Organization, and you just plain CAN'T play in the enterprise space without that. Digital's technology was an afterthought in this purchase. Compaq's execs said so publicly at the time.
Intel owns (the manufacturing) of the Alpha anyway. They're just restrained by the FTC from totally crushing the platform (that was part of the agreement when Intel settled with Digital on their lawsuit about Intel STEALING Alpha technology from Digital during some partnership dispute).
If Intel can keep their mind control lasers trained on the right people at Compaq, they can trick Compaq into killing the Alpha for them.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Aren't we forgetting a few platforms, like UltraSparc. The notion that Intel is all alone in the sub $30K server market is just absurd.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Intel owns some of the fabs, but as part of the SECs approval of the sale Compaq has to source more than 50% of its chip from vendors other than intel. The Alpha is actually rather cheap these days, its still .35 micron process and doesn't have those pesky external cache chips, just alot of onchip cache like the Celeron. In real world applications the 21264 is running about 3 times as fast as a 21164 at the same clock speed; about 60 SPECfp at 600MH.
BTW, Alpha NT isn't very popular but there are still alot of things you can only do with NT if you run it on an Alpha.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
The AMD Athlon is a cool CPU and I will probably buy one in the near future but its got NOTHING on the Alpha. 32bit x86 vs 64bit RISC there is just no comparison.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Sun has a massively more supported UNIX. netBSD and Linux run on Suns.
SGI has their MIPS and IRIX.
Why would anyone want an Alpha?, except for NT I suppose. They don't have any reason to exist now. DUX of course. Linux maybe. But, why would an IT staff encrourage the purchase of and Alpha now? They're not even that cheap!
Doesn't look good...
idiot.
Therefore, "OSen" would be better, but "OS" doesn't end in "X".
The Alpha is too expensive for me, BUT:
DEC claimed that Intel stole the Alpha design for their pentiums.
Intel paid the settlement, and, then, also bought out DEC processor manufacturing business and agreed to manufacture the Alpha for however-many years. Intel also gained ownership of the strongarm CPU in this deal.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Well, that would be really cool... except ALL THE ENGINEERS ARE BEING LAID OFF. There is no one at DECWest, the place is a ghost town. The same engineers do the work for 32 and 64 bit and the porting team is now unemployed. Most of them were contractors who were told they didn't have to report for work, that the project was DEAD.
The statement "we will not be supporting NT on Alpha, the last revision will be NT4 SP6" is the one you should pay attention to.
Jim Finlaw is just treading water, trying to ease the hysteria this decision will cause in the market. A whole lot of companies planned to buy the new Alpha DS10's and DS20's to run Win2K and then be streamlined and ready for 32 to 64 bit conversion that Compaq swore up and down would happen. Even more companies were overjoyed that Win64 would run on their old Alpha EV5's.
Compaq is not supporting NT on Alpha, at all. Development has ceased, engineering has left the building. They are going with Merced because it's cheap, even though it doesn't exist yet.
I find it so funny... I remember reading in a very early WinNT book about how NT was the OS of the future. Micro-kernel design, multi-platform support. Well.. The micro-kernel was pure for about NT 3.1. The majority of the work on that was done by an old Sun engineer. After MS-heads took over, more and more stuff got stuck in the kernel. Yeah sure NT 2000 is a microkernel OS now.. except the GDI and IIS webserver are ring 0!! As for multiplatform: The original dream was PPC, MIPS, Alpha an X86. PPC was blown away early.. MIPS support virtually collapsed thanx to SGI and NEC. And here goes Alpha support. Now the truth is laid plain. NT is a hardware specific monolithic paradigm.
Now if we can just get everybody else to do it... B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So the plural of use is ie?
So much for NT's future as a multi-platform OS like Unix, Linux and *BSD, eh?
First MIPS fell by the wayside. Then PPC. Now Alpha. "Wintel" lives.
I think Mad Dog works for VA Linux Systems now. Jim
How about doofus?
I don't think that's Latin, or even atlinay.
People on the high end of Intel hardware ($3000 to $7000 range) stick with Intel because of OS flexability
I've never heard that before. Is this true? I thought they used it because of executable compatibility. Do people really buy $5000 x86 machines because they run more than one OS? Any case-studies out there?
Compaq never made an NT only chip. NT and Tru64 require completely different BIOS. Most alphas include both BIOS flashed into CMOS but a few budget NT models do not have the TRU64 SRM BIOS. DEC made it very clear that these machines would not support anything but NT however a few small resellers thought they could get away with selling the NT model and copying the customers licenses from other Unix or VMS systems without bing new licenses. Also, in the OEM motherboard business DEC sould not sell Unix/VMS capable motherboards to resellers who were not Unix and VMS certified. Some of these board resellers sold NT boards to customers claiming they would run Unix when they couldn't.
BTW, if compaq wanted to kill the alpha line they would just halt production. Continuing production and purposely hampering sales is incredibly stupid.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Remember the bif foofaraw about Digital suing Intel over patent infringement? The reason NT was ported to the Alpha chip was for the speed. Now the pentia (and other intel offerings) have the speed too. The lab full of NT multias had that little steel tube screensaver chugging around faster than it chugged around on the 486es. This is no longer the case.
The beast is dead. Finally. What took them so long.
I was kind of hoping they'd widely license out lower-end Alpha technology to smaller chip makers, use K7 motherboards, and try to do the volume play and compete against Merced. Oh well.
Your talking about MVI instructions. They are nothing like MMX. MVI is basically an MPEG encoder built into the CPU. If you have a video capture camera you can encode 640x480 30 frame a second video MPEGs without the need for a hardware encoder card. This feature is standard on all new Alpha CPUs.
The Alpha architecture has no need of MMX like gimics to hide multimedia shortcomings.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
One of the benefits for Microsoft of having at least one active non-Intel architecture to run NT on is giving them a stick to beat Intel over the head with - if Intel looked like getting too interested in making their processors work well with other OSes, or writing software, or anything Microsoft didn't like, Microsoft would begin talking about how the future of high-end NT was with the Alpha. Intel would make sure it kept Microsoft happy. Microsoft are now stuck with the x86 compatible market, which, in the server arena, Intel own. Intel can do pretty much whatever it likes, and Microsoft can't threaten them, except by going to AMD. But, of course, AMD don't have a 64 bit offering. Which Microsoft need if they want NT to go up against VMS, OS/400, high end Solaris and IRIX and the like. The only way out of being beholden to Intel in the high-end for Microsoft is to fund its own NT/Alpha development. There's also going to be a bunch of pissed-off developers out of this, too. A lot of "high-end app on NT" developers have been relying on NT/Alpha and related clustering technologies. One wonders where they will go - Merced, or another OS? Rodger Donaldson - rodgerd@ihug.co.nz
but remember that Compaq has recently laid of about 8,000 employees.
and a lot of their top-brass has left (whether fired our on their own).
Definitely a lot of restructuring going on.
Hee hee hee! ;-) Ok, more than three with this line. However, I did want to add that this announcement has probably served to increase the count of 'colorful metaphors' being uttered in certain executive offices at a certain company in Redmond, WA... I wonder how much larger the American Slang dictionary is going to grow afer the initial reaction dies down?
MS has never really helped NT/Alpha. It took them years to port Office over. The brunt of the development work for the OS (afaik) was done by Digital, ditto marketing. This is no different really from the other chipsets that have dropped NT when their mfrs got tired of maintaining it, like MIPS. (I think there was another, but I can't remember.)
Compaq can stop supporting NT/Alpha development and immediately save lots of money that wasn't being made up in sales. If MS really wants NT/Alpha, let them pay for it.
Having watched Digital through the merger and seen Compaq make a series of poor business decisions related to the technology currently shipping and under development at Digital and the potential market share gain in niches where they had no presence, this move was no surprise.
With no production merced chips due for months and months, and no Alpha Win2K who is going to develop the user applications for Win64 and on what? The DECWest team was developing the Win64 VC++ compiler on the Alpha Win2K platform, which is dead now. Compaq has just shot MS in the head and themselves in the market.
Digital became easy prey for the recent Compaq takeover after the company took a serious nose dive following the first attempted "merger". While I wouldn't want to mention names, I can't help but think that the $300 million golden parachute that Bob Palmer jumped out of Digital with could have been quite an incentive for driving the company into the ground - had he known in advance that he would be so rewarded.
This latest decision is just one of many that hilight Compaq's total misunderstanding of computer technology and what a "technology leader" is. By killing the undernourished Digital products, some of which sold themselves with no advertising *at all*, Compaq has proven that they are not a "technology" company at all. They merely sell (or kill) what other, better companies innovate. They have no respect for high end, high speed advanced technologies or the kind of investment that produced the axiom: "if you can afford it, buy Digital Alpha.. if you can't, buy Dell or HP".
Mark Minasi wrote about Digital Cluster for NT. A clustering product that was the code base for MSCS. DCNT was done, paid for. It was a high availability 2 node cluster that ran on standard NT and supported SQL, Oracle, Netscape Server, IIS, MCIS and Network Interface failover to name a few. It was a simple, small but effective entry level clustering product. This product could have been given away FREE as and incentive to companies to buy 2 Compaq servers (it runs well even on low end cheap boxes) with standard NT while providing a vehicle for migration to MS Enterprise server and MSCS. This product was one of the first killed by Compaq after the merger. When a company totally *ignores* an opportunity to leverage server sales FREE, they are STUPID.
In the industry, there has never been any question which platform was better. Alpha has always been superior in performance, but never price. This isn't a fault in the technology, but the management who could not come up with a way to lower chip costs (like using 3rd party OEMs, such as API and finding production partners). It has been nearly 2 years since Digital produced their last processor, tied up in litigation with Intel - they were unable to go to market until just the last few months with a new line of processors: the EV6. In benchmark tests the new Alpha chips outperformed the xeon by 5 to 1. The ES40 (quad EV6) was the target platform for Win64, and would have made MS a solid contender in the enterprise. Alpha was the only real 64bit platform to develop and test on, and Compaq would have beat intel to the market on 64bit Win2K by anywhere from 3 months to 3 years. The opportunity was tremendous, the market was wide open, everyone in NT Alpha was psyched to be on top again - there was no avoiding it... or so it seemed.
So, how do IT directors feel about Compaq now that they have backpeddled on their initial promises that they would support NT on Alpha? Betrayed, decieved.. and certain that Sun, HPUX and Dell's Linux offerings will get much more favorable attention in the future. Business won't soon forget being abandoned by Compaq and Wall Street Analysts are sure to notice that the decisions made by Compaq since the merger are either grossly stupid, or circumstantial evidence of collusion to monopolize the industry around the MS operating system and the Intel processor platform.
We're sad to see Alpha being killed off like this. Technology that good deserved better, and so did the user community.
Boooooo!
winNT
didNT
wouldNT
couldNT
and now isNT
Alas that's not the end of my saga.
You sound as if the letters Z, S, and O have some meaning to you... if they don't, you're highly unlikely to know what's going on.
And if you do... what's the ratio of employees/contractors being laid off? And is it really 100% of the NT engineering workforce?
NT was the love child of David Cutler who did the original development for NT while he was working at Digital. When Digital killed the product Cutler took the idea to MS. Digital supported NT because it was a volume opporunity for Alpha (which they subsequently mismanaged).
For more information on current alpha processor specs see:
http://www.alpha-processor.com/
This generation of chips was demoed at 1Ghz in June.
The current benchmarks are more like 5 times faster than the xeon, not 3 times faster than the celeron.
First off, the suffix "i" is the plural form of "us", as in the plural of "virus" is "virii" not "viruses". Second, even if "OS" ended in "us", it would need to be a Latin word to qualify for the "i" suffix. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find an word that ends in "us" that is not derived from Latin, but I'm sure there is at least one.
Oh my goodness! Looks like Bill was wrong again!
:) And with the great performance and stability we've experienced thus far, it's been pleasant indeed (except for configuring sendmail, AIIIEEE!!!) My Boss was like, "You're really sold on this free stuff, aren't you?" I thus began my ESR impression. Things are looking up for us.
I'm working at an ISP here in Northern Ohio. I recently got hired in here to design the network and hook up the Cisco, etc. etc. My boss wanted to go with NT. I winced. After some persuasion, we decided to go with Linux.
I can't see too many corporations that are jumping on the NT bandwagon (which is a bandwagon in name only, produced by MS-Strongarm(tm)), unless they have some pretty PH-Bosses reading those NT-ad-peppered "IT Management" magazines.
And now Compaq is dumping NT and staying with Linux? My oh my looks like Bill might be as wrong about this one as he was about 640k...
May the penguin be with you.
----- if ($anyone_cares) {print "Just Another Perl Newbie"}
warn "Just Another Perl User" if $anyone_cares;
The statements about what could and couldn't be said were so vague - they basically said "don't call all the customers", and they didn't hand out any "guidelines for confidentiality" or anything...
So, yeah, the only people being asked to stay on are finishing NT4 SP6. Most of the contractors aren't reporting unless they're coming in to use the internal job search facilities. The only folks still at MS are FTE's collecting the equipment that was signed out to them for use at MS, so they will get their severence package. Rumor has it that intel and MS are scavenging 64 bit developers.. they'll probably back a van up to the front door of the site and hire people on the way out the door.
Yesterday the whole site was a ghost town and MS still hadn't responded to the news. I have yet to see an official statement by MS internally or externally. Alpha on NT is dead, everyone working on Alpha Win2K 32 AND 64 has nothing more to do. Most of the contractors who were co-located at MS have already handed in their credentials and are looking for work.
Namely, that Compaq might simply be trying to kill off the Alpha platform. As much as I prefer Linux to NT, the existence of NT on the Alpha is good for the platform.
What part of "I just got laid off" are you missing? While I'm not the source of this story, I was in the room when I was told my job was gone and that there would be NO MORE ALPHA NT development.
I don't care who Jay Perlow is... I'm looking for a new job.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Okay, so the story goes: M$ and Compaq are buddies. Both M$ and Compaq don't really like Intel. Compaq axes NT on Alpha. Hmm... pure speculation: Could it be that... Microsoft may take over the development that Compaq just left open? Maybe Compaq is streamlining towards being a pure hardware company, and dumping their software projects. I did notice that Compaq is still going ahead with their 1Gb+ versions of Alpha.
Getting laid off sucks great big ass. But I don't believe these guys will have a hard time finding work.
The same sort of thing often happens when people try to pluralise "torus"--they end up talking about Japanese architecture.
`vy-ree-ee'....
-rozzin.
retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard retard
Digital started Alpha NT because they wanted a non-Unix product (part of Win NT pie really). Compaq has many, many NT products (servers and workstations, and since they can sell you a Proliant, why bother trying to sell you an Alpha. I have both DS20 and DS10s at work (20 is tru64 oracle server, ds10 is a linux box). If you are looking for high floating performance, DS10 running linux kicks ass. Starting at ~$3000 they use 466 MHz 21264 and get ~47 spec FPs. P3s and Xeon are down 20 and k7 is maybe little above. Alphas sound really expensive to make but. I would really hate it if Compaq would get rid of Alpha all together and started using only x86, xMerced CPUs. Btw, doesn't Intel own fabs in which Alphas are made? (They bought them from DEC as part of settlement)
Right, it's not Latin; the plural of doofus is not doofi, it's Microsoft.
He may not've, but his OSes were guilty of running far too much in real mode when the '286 came out. And wasn't he the one who said "640k should be enough for anyone"?
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Well, this is just one application, but look at the statistics for Seti by cpu type. There is an Alpha churning out seti work units in 57 minutes!. It makes my 8 3/4 hr average look downright slow.
No. MS is not stuck in an x86 only market. They still make a buttload of profit on software sold for other OSes. Well, at least Office98 for Mac.\ As long as x86 still dominates the desktop, MS will be sitting pretty in the internet space. (read: ecommerce, etc.)
>After all, it's speed advantages are rapidly shrinking Shrinking, I've observed just the opposite, take for instance one of our fluid flow production codes: CPU-clock cachecompiler optionsmin:sec PII-450 512K cacheg77 -O375:02 Celeron 450A-128kg77 -O374:44 21164-600 4MB cacheg77 -O329:27 21264-500 4MB cacheg77 -O317:16 21264-500 4MB cachefort -O38:42 21264-500 4MB cachefort -O4 -arch ev6 -tune ev68:31 Almost a factor of 10 over the 450 Mhz intels sounds good to me. Even the 600 Mhz intels aren't that much faster then the 450's on many large codes because the memory system isn't any faster.
Anecdotal, I guess, but still damned impressive performance. http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/cpus.html
>After all, it's speed advantages are rapidly shrinking Shrinking, I've observed just the opposite, take for instance one of our fluid flow production codes:
- PII-450 512K cache g77 -O3 75:02
- Celeron 450A-128k g77 -O3 74:44
- 21164-600 4MB cache g77 -O3 29:27
- 21264-500 4MB cache g77 -O3 17:16
- 21264-500 4MB cache fort -O3 8:42
- 21264-500 4MB cache fort -O4 -arch ev6 -tune ev6 8:31
Almost a factor of 10 at 500 Mhz, well over a factor of 5 for the DS-10 starting at $3k or so. Not everything scales, not everything works well on a beowulf. For scalar codes alphas are a huge speedup when doing heavy FP or memory bandwidth intensive work.The VA (Veterans Affairs) was retooling all their VAXen into Alphas running NT/Alpha. This was about 1995 when I left. Given their rate of rolling things out, they probably just finished up Not a knock on govt. workers, but you have to keep the hospitals running night and day. Upgrading 170+ hospitals takes a bit of time.
This means that Intel in convincing IT Directors that anything that is Intel based is non-standard architechture and will be too expensive to implement, and maintain. This means that Intel has NO competition in the Billion dollar 10k$-30k$ server market. Be afraid AMD, be very afraid.
Golly Beav, why would Compaq, a company that is having some financial turbulence, want to concentrate on providing the resources they have available now instead of waiting on another company to provide a product (64 bit NT; stay with me here) that many people are saying they may never ship?
Gee Wally, I dunno; maybe there are some things we just aren't meant to know.
See the following URL: http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html which strikes me as a fairly in-depth discussion of the rationale for using "viruses" rather than "virii". Also, the few folks I've known who have written anti-virus software a/o have been involved in computer anti-virus research have generally used "viruses" as the plural form in a software/computing context.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The alpha chips are slowly fading into irrelevance. Good to see NT pull out in time.
I wonder if this is a prelude to dumping the Alpha completely.
After all, it's speed advantages are rapidly shrinking. The pace of x86 evolution is fueled by AMD vs Intel. Cheap Intel SMP is here, too. Why would anybody want an Alpha if a Pentium/K chip is almost as fast, cheaper and better supported?
If W2k ships without Alpha support, Alpha/NT sales will die rapidly. Anybody know what percent of sales that makes up? I'd guess its fairly big.
A text described as an internal memo has been posted at Linux Today.
In it, Compaq says,
To increase our focus on Windows NT in the enterprise, we will continue to partner aggressively with Microsoft on development of 64-bit Windows NT. Alpha is the development platform for 64-bit Windows NT.
What isn't clear is who is doing the development.
It may be that we've been overinterpreting the announcement, e.g. it might just be that Compaq's $$$ troubles forced them to dump the work in Micro$$$'s lap. (But even if that is the case, the move is likely to be seen as bad PR by users of Alpha/NT, who will understandably be feeling some fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the future right now.)
Interestingly, a few paragraphs later they seem to be more gung-ho about Tru64 and Linux than what you can easily read into those two lines about 64-bit NT. But mostly they seem to be saying that Alpha itself has a bright future for itself.
Also, on re-reading it they seem to be saying that Proliant is the way to go for NT users. Truly a bag of mixed signals; classic corporate doublespeak.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Octo = 8 greek
Pus = corrupted pod = 1 greek
Correct plurals:
Octopoda
Octopuses
-- Slashdot sucks.
this first post idiocy has to end... not to mention the despicable practice of typing ":)".
Juln
Not quite a "us" ending word, but close!
"Eye halve a spelling chequer, It came with my pea sea, It plainly marques four my revue, Miss steaks eye kin knot sea"
The settlement resulted in over $1billion dollars going from Intel to DEC in cash and other forms. DEC becoming a tier one OEM for Intel CPUs and Intel commiting to manufacture Alpha CPUs for 7 or 10 years for DEC. Alpha today is faster than Merced will be when/if it ships according to intel's own benchmark estimates.
Merced is marketing and vapor. If you look at the projected performance of Merced its no better than x86 would be in the same time frame but its not an x86 native CPU. So what you really get is no performance improvement, 64bit addressing and you have to redesign all you systems and recompile all your apps. Thats one hell of a deal ain't it?
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
OK, lets clear the air. Here's the official blurb from Enrico:
----Quote----
From: Pesatori, Enrico
Sent: Friday, August 20, 1999 3:18 PM
Subject: 32-bit Windows NT on Alpha
Importance: High
Earlier this week in New York, we announced an exciting 8-way ProLiant server line that dramatically increases our ability to scale 32-bit Windows NT for the enterprise. The response from customers and analysts has been very positive. It is clear that our ProLiant products and capabilities meet the growing requirement for 32-bit Windows NT solutions that deliver performance, scalability, manageability and reliability. This enables us to take actions that will simplify our platform strategy and our value proposition for customers and software partners.
After analyzing the needs of our customers and the reality of the marketplace, we have decided to end systems development for 32-bit Windows NT on Alpha with the delivery of V4 SP6 in late 1999. We do not plan to support 32-bit Windows 2000 on Alpha systems.
This decision in no way diminishes our strong partnership with Microsoft or our commitment to Alpha. To increase our focus on Windows NT in the enterprise, we will continue to partner aggressively with Microsoft on development of 64-bit Windows NT. Alpha is the development platform for 64-bit Windows NT.
We will continue to invest in Alpha as a core component of our NonStop eBusiness strategy, including next generation Alpha chip technology and a robust Alpha systems road map.
We will drive Alpha at the high-end of the enterprise market, where our strengths in 64-bit platforms, NonStop technology and clustering give us a competitive advantage. We have already announced an aggressive plan to grow Tru64 UNIX on Alpha in such key markets as high performance technical computing, eCommerce, telecommunications and enterprise applications, among others. We will continue to service and maintain the highest levels of customer satisfaction with our OpenVMS customers. And we will drive Alpha volumes by leveraging the growth of Linux. As we have already announced, Alpha will become the engine for future generations of our Himalaya systems, further extending Himalaya into markets requiring robust 24x7 solutions.
During the past few years a number of customers have made a commitment to Windows NT on Alpha. We are completely focused on protecting their investments and keeping them as satisfied Compaq customers. We will support 32-bit Windows NT on Alpha for as long as they require and offer migration paths to other Compaq platforms.
I have asked Bill Heil to lead the effort working with the regions to manage the communications with our customers and to arm our field teams with the information they need. The following region managers will be responsible for coordinating the implementation of this communication plan: David Booth - North America, Ken Surplice - EMEA, Mit Truax - LAC, Barry Leong - GCD, Takayasu Ichihara - CKK, and Paul Solski - APD. By Wednesday, we will provide a detailed advice package to our field teams, including Q&As, customer presentation, product roadmaps, support plans and migration offers.
Overall, we are convinced that this decision is the right one for Compaq and for our customers and partners. A simplified platform strategy will make it easier for customers and partners to understand the value we deliver. It will also enable us to maximize our investments in strategic products and focused markets that will drive market leadership and profitable growth.
Please feel free to pass this message on. In particular, we are depending on those of you on the regional coordination team to make sure it gets to the appropriate people in each country.
Enrico
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Craig Zeller, Sr. Systems Engineer, Compaq Computer Corporation
"The software manual said that it worked with Windows-95 or better... so I loaded Linux." -anon
MS has shot themselves in the foot by gradually stripping the server offering, NT, of multiplatform support. First to go was MIPS, next PPC, now Alpha.
This time MS did not drop the architectural support, but the result is the same.
MS has tied itself to a single processor manufacturer, Intel. And guess where Intel is dumping a bunch of money? Yeah, RedHat and BeOS.
Something tells me MS is in for some rocky road ahead.
Do people really buy $5000 x86 machines because they run more than one OS?
That's not exactly what I meant about Intel Hardware. What I meant was they can run NT if they are use to Windows, and get full system preformance expectations from the hardware with NT. They can run Linux or FreeBSD, and get the preformance they expect.
With Alpha, you can only get the preformance you would expect from an alpha if you run Tru64. If you run Linux, or NT, or anything else, your preformance will not be all that it could be.
We may be jumping to conclusions here. NT 4.0 is due to be superceded by Win2000 around the end of this year (if you believe MS). NT4.0 will probably only receive one or two more service packs at most before it becomes a legacy OS and the 64bit Win2000 development is being done at Microsoft by Cutler's team, not at Compaq. Perhaps Compaq decided it no longer needed to spend the effort on a soon to be obsolete version of Windows. It could be cost cutting totally unrelated to support.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
NT is slowly fading into irrelevane. Good to see Compaq pull out in time.
Alpha hardware has always been ahead, don't be fooled by the fact that people are saying how slow the Multia is, that came out when Intel only had 386's, and was dang fast for the time. Alphas are still fast, but you can't compare the old Alphas to the new Intels.
The Alpha market has problems because Tru64 UNIX costs soo much, and the compiler is another big $$$ on top of that. But, if you want to get the most out of your Alpha, you buy them.
If people out there really want to preserve Alpha as a choice in the CPU market, Linux could be an answer in the future, but it isn't now. Linux on Alpha is plagued with a few problems yet (or maybe it's just Red Hat Linux for Alpha?). In addition, gcc isn't bringing executable preformance to the levels of the commercial compilers on this hardware (more important that Linux itself).
Compaq would be wise to take some of the money they save cutting NT, and put a small fraction of that into patching up GCC for Alpha... Or, porting some commercial compilers to Linux/Alpha and selling them at a reasonable price (although this is a less preferable option).
If GCC can reach the level of efficency on Alpha hardware that it has reached on Intel (and now AMD hardware, see PGCC), Alpha will make a BIG come back. But, if Merced comes out before this happens, all bets are off. Alpha can beat Merced, but it will need the support of people NOW, not when Merced arrives. (Any Compaq guys out there? Hay, Mad Dog, how `bout getting the GCC guys a couple more 21264's, then we would all be happier!)
Compaq may very well be trying to kill the Alpha line. Linux might not even be a factor. I seem to remember Alpha making an NT ONLY chip a few years back. I worked at a call center and we kept getting complaints about people not being able to run Unix derivatives on the systems.