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Feb 6, 2020 · The DEC Alpha, the first mass-produced 64-bit processor, featured a pipeline architecture superior for the time. Intel contracted as a second-source manufacturer of the Alpha technology for DEC, whose manufacturing was superior, but limited. When Intel afterwards brought out the Itanium, supposedly borrowing some of Alpha's technology, DEC sued.
- The Alpha team set out to create a high-performance architecture, planned to last for 25 years and allow for 1000-performance increase over those 2...
- Stephen Kitt has done what seems to me an excellent job of outlining features and when they were introduced. I'll take a slightly different tack, i...
- Alpha fizzled in the face of the HP/Intel partnership pushing their Itanium 64-bit architecture. I think it's important to note that during this p...
- I was at HP when the Alpha cancellation decision was made. In fact I was part of a team that ran comparative HPC benchmarks on Alpha and x86. The f...
- My personal experience with the Alpha AXP was when I attended a presentation in the Detroit area during the introduction of the product many years...
- One little known fact is that what become PostgreSQL was done on Alpha workstations with 64MB of RAM. I forget the model number of the workstations...
- I worked in service at Dec from the 80s to 2003. Regarding the public implementation of Alpha chips: on DEC boxes it was fine. My POV as related to...
Dec 7, 2020 · 38. The main thrust of the marketing behind the DEC Alpha was its 64-bit microprocessor architecture. They got there years before potential competitors, including MIPS. At the time DEC was shipping the 64-bit Alpha, MIPS was just beginning to have success with the 32-bit MIPS R3000 being used by SGI.
- and would have improved the chances of a single RISC architecture having wide enough industry support to achieve critical mass rather than being ou...
- DEC's use of MIPS was only ever as basically a stop-gap. Before they used MIPS, DEC had started work on a project called Prism. It was intended to...
- DEC needed a 64-bit successor for their VAX. However, VAX was a very CISC architecture at a time when ISA and microarchitecture hadn't been decoupl...
- Using someone else's processor would fundamentally change the nature of the company, which historically was based on creating computer systems base...
- It goes deeper than just inventing another ISA, DEC being a hardware company that liked to invent ISAs, etc. As people who have commented (and I ca...
- DEC as a systems company had lots of experience in creating high-performance memory and i/o systems along with multi CPU clustered systems. All the...
- They wanted an architecture that was capable of supporting OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX and Windows NT in 64 Bit right from the start. MIPS was not there by...
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- Background For Alpha
- Hardware Implementations
- Alpha Systems
The Alpha architecture arose inside DEC in the late 1980s out of recognized challenges with the company’s then–current VAX product line. VAX design projects were facing difficulties in meeting their schedules and the designs were becoming overly complex for the relatively small DEC design teams. As a result VAX designs, which had had their heyday d...
The Alpha architecture was implemented in a series of hardware designs. The principal numeric designation for these designs was 21 < n > 64, where the 21 stood for the twenty-first century (since Alpha was touted to be the architecture for the next 25 years), the 64 indicated that this was a 64-bit architecture and < n > indicated the generation of...
Alpha processors were the compute engines in a long array of computer systems. DEC produced systems ranging from PC’s and workstations to high end server systems. TurboLaser was a bus based system with more than 2 GB/s of bus bandwidth used to connect multiple processors with memory and IO. Wildfire was the first link-based system, connecting group...
The Multia, later re-branded the Universal Desktop Box, was a line of desktop computers introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation on 7 November 1994. The line is notable in that units were offered with either an Alpha AXP or Intel Pentium processor as the CPU, and most hardware other than the backplane and CPU were interchangeable.
Jan 24, 2011 · One of the coolest workstations that DEC came out with was called the Digital Ultimate Workstation (a.k.a. AlphaServer 1200) - it came out in 1997 and had two 533MHz 64-bit Alpha CPUs with 4MB of cache, 4GB of RAM, and 7 Ultrawide SCSI hard disks (hot-swappable) for a mere $80,000. I actually had 4 of these given to me by Compaq for use in ...
Jun 13, 2017 · The opening of this collection has been a long time coming. In 2004 the Computer History Museum (CHM) received the collection from Hewlett-Packard, who had acquired Compaq, but did not have the resources to adequately address the collection until 2015 when CHM received a $274,500 grant to minimally process the collection as part of a larger project to process 26 of the Museum’s most valuable ...
Jun 28, 2016 · DEC Alpha: Alpha was a microprocessor from Digital Equipment Corporation which was based on 64-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC). It was designed to replace DEC's 32-bit VAX complex instruction set. The DEC Alpha microprocessors were used in a variety of Digital Equipment Corporation’s servers and workstations. The Alpha ...
