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At the time there were computers containing Alpha chips with quite a PC-ish design. I nearly bought one, so they were semi-affordable. They ran Linux well. S
by rwmj 4y ago
At the time there were computers containing Alpha chips with quite a PC-ish design. I nearly bought one, so they were semi-affordable. They ran Linux well. So it seems a bit more likely that these might have succeeded if AMD hadn't extended x86.
What you also have to remember is that Itanic was a very weird architecture. It's hard to write compilers for it, and it made the cardinal error of baking microarchitectural decisions into the ISA.
- inkyoto 4y agoYeah, by mid-2000s most RISC workstations (Alpha, Sun, SGI, PowerPC tho not IBM POWER and certainly not the top of the range datacentre class servers) had converged on the mainstream PC architecture, e.g. a PCI bus, EIDE disk controllers, standard PC memory (168-pin DIMM's and such). I had a Sun Ultra-10 as the sole «PC» at home for some years running Solaris and later Linux. After quickly getting fed up with the standard Sun keyboard, I bought a generic, no-name USB PCI card, plugged it into my Ultra-10 and connected a Microsoft Natural keyboard. It just worked, with Solaris not even requiring extra drivers or kernel modules by virtue of being a USB keyboard.