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The influence of Alpha on modern instruction sets like ARM64 and RISC-V is tremendous. It’s just sad it had to die for this to happen.
by als0 4y ago
The influence of Alpha on modern instruction sets like ARM64 and RISC-V is tremendous. It’s just sad it had to die for this to happen.
- scrlk 4y agoI'd also add that a lot of excellent ex-Alpha engineers (e.g. Jim Keller, Dan Dobberpuhl off the top of my head) ended up designing great chips at other companies.
- hajile 4y agoIt didn't die. Intel bought it from HP, stripped it for parts, then killed it. HyperTransport and a few other things were essentially just copies of Alpha's stuff cleanroom implemented by ex-Alpha employees. Designs like Sandy Bridge look quite similar to EV8. QuickPath is just Alpha's interconnect with some updates (HyperTransport was also a cleanroom copy from ex-Alpha employees). Even AVX seems inspired by the 1048-bit SIMD planned for EV9/10.
- jeffbee 4y agoHow did the Alpha ISA influence RISC-V, other than by its counterexample? Does RISC-V lack an integer divide? "Design of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture" mainly uses Alpha in the phrase "Unlike Alpha, ..." i.e. as a warning to future people. In fact, the author fairly well excoriates all of the historic RISC architectures for being myopically designed.
- ncmncm 4y agoGive RISC-V time, it will be somebody's bad example soon enough.