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I loved working on DEC Alphas. They seemed to me like the best of breed conventional 64 bit machines, and it was sad when we quit buying them because x86 boxes
by xscott 7y ago
I loved working on DEC Alphas. They seemed to me like the best of breed conventional 64 bit machines, and it was sad when we quit buying them because x86 boxes were cheaper.
> it seems to me that almost all the innovations Intel brought to the Pentium lines of CPU over many years were basically reimplementing features pioneered by the DEC Alpha
I can't find a strong source to link, but I thought most of the Alpha team ended up at Intel. If so, that would explain the trickling in of re-implementations.
- jcranmer 7y ago> I can't find a strong source to link, but I thought most of the Alpha team ended up at Intel. DEC was bought by Compaq, who sold the team to Intel at the same time it was bought by HP. Intel's Massachusetts site is a former DEC facility.
- scholia 7y agoDEC sold its StrongARM (ARM-based) business to Intel in 1997, before DEC was taken over by Compaq in 1998. It resulted in Intel's XScale business, which it later sold to Marvell. Compaq abandoned DEC's Alpha for the HP/Intel Itanic, so Intel didn't get an Alpha business. However, Compaq sold the Alpha IP to Intel in 2001, before the HP takeover in 2002. I'd be interested to know what happened to the Alpha architects, Richard L. Sites and Richard T. Witek. A quick search doesn't find anything interesting. I remember there was a breakaway of DEC engineers founding a small chip design company, but can't remember what it was called.
- russler23 7y agoOne of my CS professors used to work at DEC. His lectures were starkly clear and pretty intense. Jim Keller and other folks from PA Semi worked at DEC earlier in their careers.
- cbm-vic-20 7y agoI worked at DEC- one thing that I really miss is the high quality of documentation they produced. A lot of it has been archived here: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_dec https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_dec
- agumonkey 7y agoThrough Keller they defined the last decades.
- 2wrist 7y agoDirk Meyer ended up at AMD, it was why the likes of Hypertransport borrowed/adapted the Alpha EV6 protocol and kicked serious arse. Always loved Alpha's, their influence cast a long shadow.
- p_l 7y agoK7 Athlon's actually just used EV6 bus, to the point where motherboards were compatible with each others if you made a connector adaptor and replaced firmware. I have had very unconfirmed rumour that K8 involved so much of DEC stuff (starting with it's obviously EV7-derived design) that at one point it still had support for VAX floating point...
- 2wrist 7y agoThats class! thanks for the info.
- hinkley 7y agoWe got an Alpha, a PPC and a MIPS for testing 64 bit compatibility for our app. I believe they were donated, to make sure our code (Mosaic) ran on Windows NT. I used the DEC as my personal machine. Hardly anyone ever touched the other two, except to verify bug reports.