5 ms·
At the time that Alpha came out, the x86 was struggling to get more clock speed, and the groupthink was that RISC was the way forward. RISC chips would run at 4
by indymike 7y ago
At the time that Alpha came out, the x86 was struggling to get more clock speed, and the groupthink was that RISC was the way forward. RISC chips would run at 4-8x the clock speed of an x86 and even when you adjusted for needing 2-3x more instructions, RISC was 50-200% faster.
DEC had a winner with Alpha. It had speed, and most importantly, you could run Windows NT on it. NT mattered because most Unix vendors at the time wanted $1,000/CPU for their licenses, and NT was $cheap (the OEM version was around $300 if I recall correctly).
As other posters have said, DEC just could not get out of their own way and let Alpha succeed. Wierd sales policies, hostile partnerships, and intense competition all really stymied DEC. A lot of the weirdness came from trying to protect their legacy base of VAX and PDP midrange systems and a general hatred of IBM (who was pushing OS/2).
BTW as I recall, Windows NT supported x86, Alpha and MIPS (another RISC vendor) with the first commercially available version of NT. MS added a few other RISC architectures in the following years (ARM most notably). x86 closed the speed gap a few years later with the Pentium II (the Pentium Pro was largely used in servers) and the rest is history.
- wbl 7y ago4.4 ran on Alpha I thought. Maybe I thought wrong.
- maxerickson 7y agoIn ~2000 I knew someone using NT on an Alpha. It wasn't a better experience than my 2 year old P2, and they had paid more for it.
- jessaustin 7y agoShortly after I graduated in '98, I purchased an Alpha that ran both NT and some Unix (I forget which?). This purchase was motivated by nostalgia for the DECs in the computer lab at school, which were awesome, although I agree that in the long run I wasn't completely satisfied with it.
- hindsightbias 7y agoUltrix
- asveikau 7y agoI think alpha was also the first non-x86 architecture that Linux was ported to, in the mid 1990s.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gpderetta 7y agoLinus was a big fan of alpha.
- asveikau 7y agoYeah, I remember writings and interviews from that time period, where he spoke and wrote well on the subject. Can't say I understand very well what was going on in his mind, but somehow I got the impression that some of that was not totally specific to alpha in particular, but that alpha represented non-x86 at large, and he was excited and enthusiastic to tackle the technical problem of making the kernel portable. And certainly it paid dividends; eg. linux on ARM is running on billions of devices today, and that surely would have been more work had they not decided to make the kernel portable in the first few years of its history.
- ithkuil 7y agoI don't think Ultrix was ever ported on Alpha. It was probably OSF/1 or Tru64.
- icedchai 7y agoUltrix was MIPS (DECstation) and VAX, not Alpha. Alpha was OSF/1, which became Digital Unix and then Tru64.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThey closed the speed gap because the Pentium Pro is a RISC core with x86 front end.
- tachyonbeam 7y agoIn an alternate universe, DEC got out of their own way and partnered with IBM to port OS/2 to Alpha. I wonder what that world would have looked like.
- Fnoord 7y agoWindows NT also ran on PowerPC and Itanium [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
- deaddodo 7y ago>MS added a few other RISC architectures in the following years (ARM most notably). Windows NT never came to ARM. The work was rolled into Windows 8 with RT.
- somesortofsystm 7y agoI had a DEC Alpha to play with, back in the day. Was a port target for some of our projects, and I occasionally booted it into NT for the druthers. I much preferred my SGI boxen at the time. And when Linux hit Alpha, NT was little more than a plaything. Oddly enough, its how I feel about the "NT on non-x86" rigs I occasionally run into, also being pitched as a port target for some of my modern projects.