> outside of the highly specialized embedded-application market, RISC is in retreat
with hindsight it is funny to realize that RISCs come back would start from inside that highly specialized market in the form of ARM.
The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
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Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#22In those days, I was using SGI machines to build web sites for folks .. the Indy was very popular for this purpose. One day I was given a DEC Alpha machine to evaluate and see if it was a worthwhile addition to our inventory.
It came with NT, so there was some friction to just adding it to our services. These days were very frustrating - Microsoft was hell-bent on killing Unix, and later Linux also - and there was a lot of back and forth in our engineering team whether we wanted to invest in this hassle.
We didn't. I had that machine under my desk doing basically nothing for a year, before I sent it back.
If there had been a bit more insight into the nature of things, and if it had been running a Unix variant, we would have given it a better chance.
So then it was even more frustrating when SGI did a deal with the devil in later years, and tried to get its customers switch to NT, also. That killed SGI, in my opinion.
Looking back now, it's kind of incredible the resistance to Unix in those days, and how it was all going to be replaced with some "New Technology". Linux won. SGI didn't. And DEC was an early victim they should have learned from, in my opinion.
Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#23The bit about how the AMD Athlon (K7) uses the same bus, and how they planned to make Slot A Alphas where the only adjustment an Althon motherboard would need is a different BIOS. Imagine what might have been, especially as Alpha Windows 2000 had a built in FX!32. Cheap Alpha systems with a good x86 compatibility story, it could've been a contender.
(Yeah, I know, several stars would've had to align for it to actually work).
Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#24I seem to remember that Alpha’s were very fast for the time but their maximum optimization level waived IEEE floating point conformance. This, of course, drove us nuts trying to validate ports of numerically intensive code. Less interesting chips with lower optimization and limited market penetration. Now, HP’s PA-RISC chips…. Those things were fast and easier to work with. Curiously, with SoftPC they could do window…
600Mhz Alphas existed when there was 195mhz MIPS
turns out there is more involved in performance than just clock rate
who knew? (everyone)
Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#25[flagged]
Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#26The bit about how the AMD Athlon (K7) uses the same bus, and how they planned to make Slot A Alphas where the only adjustment an Althon motherboard would need is a different BIOS. Imagine what might have been, especially as Alpha Windows 2000 had a built in FX!32. Cheap Alpha systems with a good x86 compatibility story, it could've been a contender. (Yeah, I know, several stars would've had to align for it to actuall…
"Cheap" and "Alpha" would have been hard to pull of simultaneously. But it would have been really cool.
Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
600Mhz Alphas existed when there was 195mhz MIPS
turns out there is more involved in performance than just clock rate who knew? (everyone)
And the Alpha was faster
The last line of the parent post makes it sound as if the chips didn't exist at the same time.
Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#28> David Jessel, the Alpha's senior product manager, claims that Alpha fans have nothing to worry about. "Compaq has been fully supportive of the Alpha and is continuing to invest in it," Jessel said. That worked out swimmingly for Alpha... >sigh I never programmed Alpha assembly, so I don't really have a feel for the architecture. I did deploy some Alpha-based boxes running NT, and they were very nice. They didn't fe…
My understanding is that after Compaq sold the Alpha IP to intel, and quite a lot of the DNA ended up in Nehalem and Sandy Bridge.
IIRC, the Sunway CPUs used in Chinese supercomputers have an Alpha-like design.
Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#29The bit about how the AMD Athlon (K7) uses the same bus, and how they planned to make Slot A Alphas where the only adjustment an Althon motherboard would need is a different BIOS. Imagine what might have been, especially as Alpha Windows 2000 had a built in FX!32. Cheap Alpha systems with a good x86 compatibility story, it could've been a contender. (Yeah, I know, several stars would've had to align for it to actuall…
There was a problem with that idea, DEC engineers working for AMD made K7 too fast for Alpha to compete.
Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
#30In those days, I was using SGI machines to build web sites for folks .. the Indy was very popular for this purpose. One day I was given a DEC Alpha machine to evaluate and see if it was a worthwhile addition to our inventory. It came with NT, so there was some friction to just adding it to our services. These days were very frustrating - Microsoft was hell-bent on killing Unix, and later Linux also - and there was a…
From Microsoft’s POV they soundly beat Unix in the 1990s because they were primarily focused on the GUI workstation market.
In 1991 the market for high-end desktop software like engineering, video editing and 3D modeling tools was dominated by Unix and classic Mac. In 1999 all of those applications were on Windows NT.
Vendors like Autodesk and Avid were building for Windows first. New graphics acceleration hardware targeted PC add-on cards rather than being exclusive to a workstation vendor (SGI tried this approach with their NT box and it flopped).
In retrospect it was just commercial Unix that had lost the game, but it wasn’t obvious at the time that Linux could reclaim this market. And Mac OS X was considered by many a doomed project (after all Apple had been promising a new OS for the entire ‘90s, nobody knew how deeply the NeXT acquisition would transform the company).