It's also interesting that the Alpha CPU can be blamed for the poor file compression in Windows - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=94615 https://d

It's also interesting that the Alpha CPU can be blamed for the poor file compression in Windows - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=94615 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=94615 One of my now-retired colleagues worked on real-time compression, and he told me that the Alpha AXP processor was very weak on bit-twiddling instructions. For the algorithm that was ultimately chosen, the smallest unit of encoding in the compressed stream was the nibble; anything smaller would slow things down by too much. This severely hampers your ability to get good compression ratios. More Alpha details from Raymond Chen: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170807-00/?p=96766 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170807-00/?p=96...