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> 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 feel pieced-together like x86 servers did.



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.


Another somewhat related error in strategy was trying to keep VAX alive for longer than it should have been, especially the ECL versions


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


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


IIRC, the Sunway CPUs used in Chinese supercomputers have an Alpha-like design.




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