On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Benjamin Scott wrote:
>
> Hmmmm. Just saw this:
>
> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-06-25-004-21-NW-BZ-HW
>
> While it has some sensationalist tones and never quite gets around to saying
> "Compaq has discontinued the Alpha line", it doesn't sound good. The Alpha is
> likely the cleanest general-purpose microprocessor architecture in production
> today, and I would hate to see it go, but given Compaq's history, this would
> not surprise me.
>
> I know we have some still-DECies-at-heart on this list, as well as some
> Alpha people... do you guys know anything?
Compaq has sold Alpha to Intel, including the rights to hire many of the
engineers working on Alpha and the related software (compilers etc....).
Compaq will deliver EV7 (next generation Alpha), but after that everything
will be moved to Itanium (Tru64, OpenVMS and NSK are to be ported).
Now..why you ask? (These are my thoughts on the deal, not necessarily the
views of the companies involved).
Intel has spent 7(?) years on Itanium, and any day now you'll be able to
buy one. It rellies VERY HEAVILY on compilers....Compaq has some of the
best compilers out there, so they can use that knowledge to improve
Itanic's compilers. They also get the chip designers, the guys that have
been working on Alpha for several years (though if memory serves most of
the the original Alpha architects now work for AMD).
Alpha is still the fastest chip out there (yes, I know P4 has a higher MHz
rating, but anyone who knows anything about computers knows MHz is a
fairly useless measure of CPU performance), so if they can take some of
the technology from Alpha and move it into Itanic then all the better.
The radical view would say Intel is going to use an Alpha core and just
place an EPIC instruction layer over the top (much like the PPro, PII,
PIII, P4)...but Im not sure they'll go that far.
and, let's not forget they just removed a competitor from the field, and
locked in Compaq for the next X years.
Now what does Q get? They get rid of the liabilty of Alpha, it was never
the reason they bought DEC (what was that reason again??) and they didn't
know what to do with it. They were never going to aggresivly market it
against Intel as they also sold Intel CPUs (FWIW, this also applies to
Linux, they will never aggresivly go after Linux because of MS).
Not to mention they probably secured a good price from Intel on Itaniums
(that's pure speculation on my part).
How's that?
--rdp
--
Rich Payne
[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.alphalinux.org
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