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HP could have killed the PC market with Alpha, spending all that Itanic development money on transitioning PCs from x86 to Alpha via an emulator, and then promo

HP could have killed the PC market with Alpha, spending all that Itanic development money on transitioning PCs from x86 to Alpha via an emulator, and then promoting native software. Apple have pulled this trick three times now, with great success. Instead Intel/HP nuked the entire mid/high-end of the industry including their own project and set computing back by a decade or so. She was also a notoriously terrible CEO for other reasons. And then tried to jump-start a political career with one of the worst campaign videos ever made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKWlOxhSIKk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKWlOxhSIKk

dan-robertson 4y ago
I would be curious to read what people at DEC/Compaq/HP thought at the time about this because presumably people on the Alpha team would have thought of this idea. IIRC the Alpha could run x86 (with automatic translation) faster than the latest Intel chips[1] but then Intel got sufficiently good at the whole out-of-order thing (and I guess at the process of making chips in general) that they took the lead. Maybe there are good reasons that the people working on the Alpha thought they couldn’t win? I’m particularly interested in the Alpha because it seems like the thing was designed with many of today’s CPU performance challenges in mind. E.g. simple stuff like 64-bit but also things like caches and multiprocessing (cf the very weak concurrent memory model). See also [2] [1] eg see this from ’97 claiming that 0.5GHz Alpha could run x86 at comparable speed to a 2GHz PII https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt97/full_papers/chernoff/chernoff.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... but I’ve also seen claims that the Pentium Pro of ’95 would have been faster than this [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/151220.151226 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/151220.151226 and I think the same here: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art1.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art1.p...
- scrlk 4y ago
  Re: Alpha team - as a side note, two ex-Alpha engineers played a pretty pivotal role in the processor landscape we have today: Dan Dobberpuhl - founded PA Semi, acquired by Apple in 2008 and kicked off Apple's custom processor strategy. Jim Keller - arguably the most famous processor architect alive today (Athlon 64, AMD Zen, Apple A4/5).
ghaff 4y ago
Alpha was six feet under by the time HP acquired Compaq which had acquired DEC. Computing was in no way set back by a decade. The alternative to Itanium was, as Gelsinger has said publicly, an enhanced x86 Xeon--which is what Intel ended up doing (and which HP subsequently adopted to run HP-UX and it's other enterprise OSs). Obviously ARM has won out over x86 on mobile and--in a limited way--on the desktop. ARM's footprint will probably increase. We'll see. Then there's RISC-V. But that's all basically RISC.

dan-robertson 4y ago

I would be curious to read what people at DEC/Compaq/HP thought at the time about this because presumably people on the Alpha team would have thought of this idea. IIRC the Alpha could run x86 (with automatic translation) faster than the latest Intel chips[1] but then Intel got sufficiently good at the whole out-of-order thing (and I guess at the process of making chips in general) that they took the lead. Maybe there are good reasons that the people working on the Alpha thought they couldn’t win? I’m particularly interested in the Alpha because it seems like the thing was designed with many of today’s CPU performance challenges in mind. E.g. simple stuff like 64-bit but also things like caches and multiprocessing (cf the very weak concurrent memory model). See also [2] [1] eg see this from ’97 claiming that 0.5GHz Alpha could run x86 at comparable speed to a 2GHz PII https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt97/full_papers/chernoff/chernoff.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... but I’ve also seen claims that the Pentium Pro of ’95 would have been faster than this [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/151220.151226 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/151220.151226 and I think the same here: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art1.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/vol4num4art1.p...

scrlk 4y ago
Re: Alpha team - as a side note, two ex-Alpha engineers played a pretty pivotal role in the processor landscape we have today: Dan Dobberpuhl - founded PA Semi, acquired by Apple in 2008 and kicked off Apple's custom processor strategy. Jim Keller - arguably the most famous processor architect alive today (Athlon 64, AMD Zen, Apple A4/5).

ghaff 4y ago

Alpha was six feet under by the time HP acquired Compaq which had acquired DEC. Computing was in no way set back by a decade. The alternative to Itanium was, as Gelsinger has said publicly, an enhanced x86 Xeon--which is what Intel ended up doing (and which HP subsequently adopted to run HP-UX and it's other enterprise OSs). Obviously ARM has won out over x86 on mobile and--in a limited way--on the desktop. ARM's footprint will probably increase. We'll see. Then there's RISC-V. But that's all basically RISC.