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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)

#61

Post by [deleted] »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #57
somat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD only pressured Intel into adapting the 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture, The Intel native 64-bit system was the Itanium. Which they were hoping would break x86 and it's messy open legacy that allowed AMD to profit off it. A question on terminology, I come from bsd world so prefer i386, amd64, ia64(the itanium) whereas the linux side appears to prefer x86 x86-64 Nothing wrong with it(it describes the arch…

> A question on terminology, I come from bsd world so prefer i386, amd64, ia64(the itanium) whereas the linux side appears to prefer x86 x86-64 Nothing wrong with it(it describes the architecture fine) but I assume that x86-64 is intel face saving propaganda. There exist two different (and slightly incompatible) implementations of 64-bit x86, which the respective CPU vendors call AMD64 and Intel 64 (previous names of…

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by rhelz »

hinkley wrote: post #40
rhelz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I am old, and have lived through four ages of the west, (the 8, 16, 32, and 64-bit ages), and have seen many defeats, and many fruitless victories."

Some wise person in the 90's looked at the 16-32 bit transition, and side-eyed the 64 bit machines that were already available. He noted how differently we write software on 32 bit hardware (flat memory addressing, virtual memory, etc), and wondered what sorts of things we'd do differently on 64 bit. It took a while, but I think the answer is virtual machines, and multiplexing virtual addresses in a single process. T…

According to the mighty google (and other HN comments) we are running out of address space at about 1 bit per year or so. So most of us will not live to see the need for 128 bit computers. An interesting thing to think about is this: how extraordinary it was to live through 3 or 4 of these transitions. If we keep running out of bits at the rate of one per year (and we don't go extinct) that means that most humans will never life through any transitions. We are either the lucky ones (because we got to seee so many transitions) or the unlucky ones (because we are the ones who had to cope with the disruptions of doubling pointer lengths.)

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

#63

Post by MomsAVoxell »

adrian_b wrote: post #37
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…

Engineering never went completely to Windows NT. Between 1997 and 2007, I worked at 3 different companies, in 3 different countries (2 in Europe + Israel) as Design Engineer in electronics. All the serious engineering programs for EDA/CAD were run on Solaris and accessed from Windows with X-terminal programs. Towards the end of that decade, the Opteron-based servers were both much faster and much cheaper than the Sun…

Fair enough, while the engineers used Microsoft things, the telecommunications industry - and many, many others - simply switched to Linux.

I know only a handful of hardware designers who use Linux/MacOS, and if they do, for sure there's a Windows VM or a spare machine in the cubical too.

Some sort of stasis has been accomplished.

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

#64

Post by chasil »

p_l wrote: post #56
chasil wrote: post #47

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 phon…

The issue was not that Alpha ISA was impossible to scale down. The issue was that DEC lacked the resources to run a completely new microarchitecture design to target low-power platforms, and the failure was trying to push an extreme performance chip into low-power envelope instead of designing a new one. AFAIK with ARM the difference is that they started with low-power underpowered chip and modified it to bring the p…

This interview with Allen Baum seems to imply that DEC was quite aware of what could easily be done with Alpha, and what could not.

I'm also assuming that ARM code density was better than Alpha (conditional opcodes being a major contributor).

"Well, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year...

"Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of highly combined... And then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto, we were just gonna start an Alpha project."

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

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

#65

Post by sillywalk »

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…

I believe the original Toy Story was 'created' on SGIs, but the render farm was SPARC.

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

#66

Post by pengaru »

whaleofatw2022 wrote: post #19
phire wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure about that bit... What is well known however, is that a bunch of Alpha engineers wound up at AMD, and a lot of that DNA went into the OG Athlon

  > Intel developed QPI at its Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center (MMDC) by
  > members of what had been the Alpha Development Group, which Intel had acquired
  > from Compaq and HP and in turn originally came from Digital Equipment
  > Corporation (DEC).[8] Its development had been reported as early as 2004
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_QuickPath_Interconnect#B...

QPI was Intel's answer to the competition AMD's Athlon / HyperTransport had created

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

#67

Post by synack »

stmw wrote: post #18

Fun fact - Linus first trip to the United States was related to Linux-on-Alpha port and sponsored by Digital Equipment Corporation.

The Alpha CPUs didn’t implement the div instruction and Linus’ assembly version was faster than DEC’s in some cases.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...

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

#68

Post by ciupicri »

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…

Regarding the "Titanic" film, from the Linux Journal (https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494):

> We rapidly concluded the DEC Alpha-based systems served our batch-processing needs very well. They provide extremely high floating-point performance in commodity packaging. We were able to identify certain floating-point-intensive applications as port targets. The Alpha systems could be configured with large amounts of memory and fast networking at extremely attractive price points. Overall, the DEC Alpha had the best price/performance match for our needs. [...]

> At this point, the decision was made to purchase 160 433MHz DEC Alpha systems from Carrera Computers of Newport Beach, California. Of those 160 machines, 105 of the machines are running Linux, the other 55 are running NT. The machines are connected with 100Mbps Ethernet to each other and to the rest of our facility. [...]

> The floating-point power of the DEC Alpha made jobs run about 3.5 times faster than on our old SGI systems.

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

#69

Post by p_l »

chasil wrote: post #64
p_l wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue was not that Alpha ISA was impossible to scale down. The issue was that DEC lacked the resources to run a completely new microarchitecture design to target low-power platforms, and the failure was trying to push an extreme performance chip into low-power envelope instead of designing a new one. AFAIK with ARM the difference is that they started with low-power underpowered chip and modified it to bring the p…

This interview with Allen Baum seems to imply that DEC was quite aware of what could easily be done with Alpha, and what could not. I'm also assuming that ARM code density was better than Alpha (conditional opcodes being a major contributor). "Well, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, real…

An important thing to consider is that DEC simply didn't have enough CPU design teams, which is also why Alpha essentially had only one-and-half model in the works throughout its history - and the half came from smashing smallest chipset variant into single chip with the CPU for pretty bad performance (too slow memory, mainly). A low-power Alpha CPU would have to be a from scratch design, even if arguably simple to implement ISA-compatible chip.

StrongARM was developed in partnership with ARM, not starting from zero, applying some of the techniques Digital developed with Alpha to ARM - reputedly creating the idea that ARM could be fast at all

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

#70

Post by p_l »

pengaru wrote: post #66
whaleofatw2022 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about that bit... What is well known however, is that a bunch of Alpha engineers wound up at AMD, and a lot of that DNA went into the OG Athlon

> Intel developed QPI at its Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center (MMDC) by > members of what had been the Alpha Development Group, which Intel had acquired > from Compaq and HP and in turn originally came from Digital Equipment > Corporation (DEC).[8] Its development had been reported as early as 2004 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_QuickPath_Interconnect#B... QPI was Intel's answer to the competition…

The funny part is that arguably both HyperTransport and QPI descend from the interprocessor links designed for Alpha EV7
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