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The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

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Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#41

Post by rhelz »

hinkley wrote: post #35

Digital, HP, and IBM had the foresight to supply NCSA with Windows NT machines with their respective not-Intel chips in them to make sure that they had a web browser on their platforms. I got the honor of using the Alpha machine, and so it got the most QA by far. I recall spending an unnecessary amount of time not only staring at the heat sink but occasionally showing it to the new guy so they could confirm my astoni…

Most of the barriers for Alpha adoption were problems inherent in the 32-bit to 64-bit transition. Alignment problems, yes, but another killer problem was that 64-bit pointers were twice as large.

The software I was writing at the time (EDA) took almost exactly twice as much memory. So if we needed more than 4GB, we could go to a 64-bit machine, but unless you bought even more than 8GB, you couldn't really run on bigger problems.

As you note, all those problems had to be sorted out 10 years later, when AMD finally forced Intel's hand into selling 64-bit computers.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#42

Post by danielktdoranie »

Hardly anyone ran NT on these beautiful chips. Tru64 was the OS of choice for these in 1998. Hence the decision by MS to cease support. Running NT on a Dec Alpha would be like running kerosene in your Ferrari’s engine. If you wanted to run Windows NT you could do so a lot cheaper on an x86 PC.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#43

Post by adrian_b »

pixelesque wrote: post #38
pavlov wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Yeah, even in like 1996/1997 for certain industries there were hints as to the way things were going, even if it took 4/5 years for the transition to fully take place. For example, in 1996/1997, Digital Domain (VFX industry) used a 'render farm' cluster of Carrera Alpha workstations running NT to render the Titanic film, instead of SGIs running IRIX. (SGIs were still often used on the artists workstations though, but…

In 1999, AMD Athlon became the first x86 CPU that was able to do both an addition and a multiplication during one clock cycle, for the 80-bit x87 floating-point numbers.

The previous Intel CPUs of the P6 family, from Pentium Pro to Pentium III, required 2 clock cycles for that, i.e. they reached at most half the throughput of Athlon at the same clock frequency. And Athlon had an even higher clock frequency.

So the launch of Athlon was one of the greatest jumps in floating-point performance per socket in the history of x86 CPUs.

It had a higher clock frequency than any Alpha. IBM POWER CPUs could do much more per clock cycle than Athlon, but their clock frequency was much lower, so Athlon was still faster.

One year and a half later Intel launched Pentium 4, which could match the throughput per clock cycle of Athlon, but only when executing new SSE2 programs, not when executing any legacy program.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#44

Post by shdwslrkr »

pjmlp wrote: post #34
shdwslrkr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it wouldn't have. Without AMD rescuing x86, PowerPC wouldn't have died. MIPS wouldn't have died, and faces with the need to brake the 4Gn barrier on consumer equipment microsoft would have had windows running on three or four competing architectures until 2013 when everything would have switched to ARM. Itanium would have already been a rotting corpse. AMD rescued Intel from its own management.

Sure it would, Windows XP 64 bits was alreary on Itanium, and NT versions for PowerPC and MIPS were already dead by then.

First thank you for generously understanding my post despite the vandalism that autocorrect did to it.

WindowsNT is remarkably well suited to porting to other arch. This was done on purpose to hedge against x86. Dead one day, reactivated the other. MS needed to brake the 4Gb barrier and they would have done anything to get consumer priced 64bit chips.

Itanium was a dog. We had an Itanium SGI "supercomputer". Everything about it that SGI designed was amazing (hot swapping cpus). The cpu was a dog.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#45

Post by trimbo »

dosinga wrote: post #21

> 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.

And just like the 90s, every major tech company is making their own RISC chip[1]! Apple Silicon, Tensor, Graviton, Axion, Cobalt, Grace....

[1] - Though not exactly since they're all ARM ISA at the foundation.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#46

Post by microtonal »

krylon wrote: post #26
fredoralive wrote: post #23

The 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.

The AXPpci 33 boards were pretty cheap at some point. I had one at the end of the 90s and I think it was 100-200 Dutch guilders.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#47

Post by chasil »

For everyone who says that the Alpha was a technically-superior CPU design that should have prevailed, I will draw attention to an interesting fact:

"According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM

While AArch64 has been in the top supercomputer, a phone running on Alpha was not.

For this scalability problem, it deserved to die.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#48

Post by rasz »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #14
EvanAnderson wrote: post #4

> 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…

On the hardware side, DEC built very-well engineered hardware. The early Alpha machines were very well designed. Even the PC compatible lines of the era were built to a very high quality standard.

> Even the PC compatible lines of the era were built to a very high quality standard.

DEC had a moment between 1990-92 when they did pretty good in PC market. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

'As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.'

@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and it worked, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#49

Post by hedgehog »

pjmlp wrote: post #34
shdwslrkr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it wouldn't have. Without AMD rescuing x86, PowerPC wouldn't have died. MIPS wouldn't have died, and faces with the need to brake the 4Gn barrier on consumer equipment microsoft would have had windows running on three or four competing architectures until 2013 when everything would have switched to ARM. Itanium would have already been a rotting corpse. AMD rescued Intel from its own management.

Sure it would, Windows XP 64 bits was alreary on Itanium, and NT versions for PowerPC and MIPS were already dead by then.

It's unclear to me what would have likely happened had AMD stayed on IA32 and Netburst been uncontested. Itanium was far too expensive for consumer machines and it seems very possible that Intel would have fumbled IA64 in a way similar to more recent AVX-512 and their big.little efforts. Easy enough to port XP to Itanium, hard to get those machines into Best Buy or the Dell catalog in any way that makes sense. Had AMD continued Athlon performance improvements and Intel still responded with a P6-derived Pentium M (which even in our timeline was 32-bit) it still seems like there would have been no volume market for IA64 and we still would have eventually ended up with an evolution of IA32 even if it came from Intel instead of AMD.

Re: The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

#50

Post by rasz »

hinkley wrote: post #36
rasz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a problem with that idea, DEC engineers working for AMD made K7 too fast for Alpha to compete.

There was a second problem with that, Digital proved in court that Intel stole their architecture to put into the Pentium. Part of the settlement was that Intel had to fab for Digital for a long time and pay for a bunch of their patents. The Digital folks made it sound like it was a victory for them but it felt like the beginning of the end, and sure enough it was. I think Alpha's big problem was people were still mi…

Sounds like similar paper "win" to DEC OpenVMS lawsuit against Microsoft where MS penalty was supporting Alpha while DEC trained its enormous sales/engineering arm to sell and support NT thus killing any incentives to buy DEC hw in the first place. DEC moved upstream the value chain and Microsoft moved tons of NT to all existing DEC corporate customers.
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