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I'm curious why there wasn't more interest in the DEC Alpha AXP. It was designed from the beginning as a 64-bit chip (unlike x86, POWER, ARM, MIPS, HP PA-RISC,

by KMag 11y ago

I'm curious why there wasn't more interest in the DEC Alpha AXP. It was designed from the beginning as a 64-bit chip (unlike x86, POWER, ARM, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, and almost everything else except Itanium). It consciously avoided features (and memory model features) that interfered with efficient parallel superscalar implementations. The Ultrix, Linux, and VMS kernels didn't run in privileged mode, but instead made upcalls into PAL code (a kind of super lightweight hypervisor). Any insights as to why the Alpha AXP didn't get more interest after it was dropped by DEC / HP?

nickpsecurity 11y ago
I'd like to hear others chine in on this as Im also curious. What I saw, though, was a general trend towards Intel dud go its price/performance advantages and many apps moving to Windows. The UNIX workstations could easily be five digits for a few CPU's. Maybe price didn't come down enough. Additionally, most UNIX users were going toward BSD or Linux as they picked up steam. They were available on cheap, Intel boxes. On top of it, Alpha's may (3rd party info) have had a hard time keeping power usage low trying to beat Intel on performance. IBM PPC chips having that problem is part of why Apple switched to x86 for laptops. Eventually, Compaq killed Alpha's off citing the development cost (8-9 digits) and how sales didnt justify it. I.P. got spun off into Intel/Samsung company, licensed maybe once, and idk from there. PALcode ended up in Itanium but not sure if for Intel or developer use. Far as Alpha, crash-safe.org secure CPU's use that ISA for some reason. You could always, in theory, put an Alpha decoder or whatever in front of other RISC internals to emulate one.