4 ms·
Is it too cynical to assert that this was the actual intent?
by dlsa 5y ago
Is it too cynical to assert that this was the actual intent?
- Cullinet 5y agoIt was the intent of DEC and HP insofar as they joined the Itanium programme and EOL'd their own designs.
- psandor 5y agoDEC was part of HP at that point, so it was the HP leadership that made the decision to ditch Alpha.
- Paianni 5y agoCompaq bought DEC and killed Alpha before both got folded into HP.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoAlpha was the reason DEC was for sale. It was a very cool speedy architecture, but it took too long to emerge from the DEC management swamp. Bitsavers has a series of memos showing how the Alpha predecessor Prism went down in flames when DEC decided to quick-fix its technology hole with MIPS. Alpha was a kind of illicit skunk works leftover from that failed project. If DEC had pushed it out the door a couple of years earlier - not likely, but possible with a push - it might have eaten the rest of the industry.
- jabl 5y agoI suspect that whatever the virtues of the Alpha architecture [1], DEC simply didn't have the muscle to stay in the game with exponentially increasing R&D costs. [1] And it's not like Alpha was some shining beauty of ISA design either. Early versions lacking sub-word load/store, the absolutely crazy memory consistency model, ...