9 ms·

What you mean by “contemporaneous” matters a lot here, as a few of the answers cover. When it was introduced, it was faster clock for clock and clocked signifi

What you mean by “contemporaneous” matters a lot here, as a few of the answers cover. When it was introduced, it was faster clock for clock and clocked significantly higher than Intel’s best chips. This gap didn’t last. This is the period when Intel started to really differentiate on fab technology and at the same time successfully modernized their x86 microarchitecture. By the time they adopted x86-64—reluctantly or otherwise—Alpha was neither performance nor economically competitive. This was at root a business problem: They couldn’t build a high-end market at the scales they needed to support continued development at Intel’s pace. Intel had their consumer business to cover even major screwups like Itanium. DEC of the ‘90’s did not have that luxury.

toast0 3y ago
> By the time they adopted x86-64—reluctantly or otherwise—Alpha was neither performance nor economically competitive. AMD's first AMD64 processor launched April 2003, Intel's first launched June 2004. Compaq had sold the Alpha IP to Intel in 2001. Yes, there were new Alpha models released in 2003 and 2004, but I don't think there was heart in it; in 1999, Compaq and Microsoft canceled Windows 2000 for Alpha during the release candidate phase. In short, it shouldn't be surprising that a 2004 Intel processor was faster and cheaper than a high performance system line that hadn't had much investment for five years.
- twoodfin 3y ago
  Sure. My point was that Intel's embrace of x86-64 marked the final door closing on any rationale for choosing Alpha over x86. >4GB without magic tricks was important even then for large scale database and similar applications. Believe me, there were still true believers waiting for EV8 in 2004, despite the mounting evidence that Compaq wasn't at all interested in proving the world was wrong about Alpha.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  Didn't AMD use the Alpha bus protocol or am I mixing things up here?
  - darkhelmet 3y ago
    You are correct. In spite of the carve-up of the company, many designers ended up at AMD. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details and it is second hand information, but as I remember it: * The Alpha bus architecture was used directly as the foundation of the Opteron and Athlon64 chips. * The Alpha chipsets were used for Opteron/Athlon64 (eg: irongate family) * A lot of the internals formed the foundation of Athlon64/Opteron, including the floating point system. * A bunch more foundational work that I wasn't clear on was used. Alpha was far more closely related to Athlon64/Opteron than a lot of people realized. I did the FreeBSD port to AMD64 and had a bunch of back-channel contacts with former co-workers who moved to AMD at the time. I had a steady stream of engineering samples, toys, documents and gossip. I still have a bunch of it around somewhere as souvenirs. Aside: My favorite "secret" was REX32 mode. It was a special mode where the CPU allowed access to the 64 bit registers in a 32 bit OS, think 32 bit WindowsXP. It did not require the OS to be aware of this. Context switching of this extra state was bolted onto the side of fxsave/fxrstor in reserved areas at the time. This mostly intended to allow things like hot spots of nvidia drivers and libraries to secretly work in 64 bit mode on Windows XP. I was told that it made significant improvements to benchmarks. Officially it was just an engineering test feature. Sadly, it was removed - for a number of reasons.
  - hajile 3y ago
    Kinda. With Alpha, AMD got most of the scientists and Intel got all the IP. HyperTransport (and everything else copied from Alpha) was a cleanroom solution. Intel's Quickpath is closer to Alpha's tech (along with some claims that stuff like AVX came from upcoming Alpha SIMD designs). Alpha EV8 was planned to be very wide (8-issue) design with SMT and a massive SIMD unit. It was supposed to launch in 2004. Intel's chips didn't get that wide until Haswell in 2013.
- wuming2 3y ago
  At my university one assistant professor bought an Alpha powered PC. Don’t remember the brand but it was COTS as much as possible other students murmured. An attempt to find the economies of scale. Unfortunately the video card had no driver ready. So it sat under a desk unused for years. Being an embarrassing mistake at first, then forgotten and eventually obsolete.
vajrabum 3y ago
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that Intel bought the Alpha IP in 2001. I don't know, but I've heard that enabled Intel to greatly improve x86 performance.
derefr 3y ago
> They couldn’t build a high-end market at the scales they needed to support continued development at Intel’s pace. It's interesting how different things are today. If someone came along today with a new ground-up design for a CPU architecture + ISA, that was truly "better", all they would need to do is to show it to the cloud hardware vendors, and they'd likely get a billion dollars of runway shoved into their hands.
panick21_ 3y ago
AMD kicked Intels ass, Intel literally just used its monopoly and lawsuits against AMD.

toast0 3y ago

> By the time they adopted x86-64—reluctantly or otherwise—Alpha was neither performance nor economically competitive. AMD's first AMD64 processor launched April 2003, Intel's first launched June 2004. Compaq had sold the Alpha IP to Intel in 2001. Yes, there were new Alpha models released in 2003 and 2004, but I don't think there was heart in it; in 1999, Compaq and Microsoft canceled Windows 2000 for Alpha during the release candidate phase. In short, it shouldn't be surprising that a 2004 Intel processor was faster and cheaper than a high performance system line that hadn't had much investment for five years.

twoodfin 3y ago
Sure. My point was that Intel's embrace of x86-64 marked the final door closing on any rationale for choosing Alpha over x86. >4GB without magic tricks was important even then for large scale database and similar applications. Believe me, there were still true believers waiting for EV8 in 2004, despite the mounting evidence that Compaq wasn't at all interested in proving the world was wrong about Alpha.
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
Didn't AMD use the Alpha bus protocol or am I mixing things up here?
- darkhelmet 3y ago
  You are correct. In spite of the carve-up of the company, many designers ended up at AMD. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details and it is second hand information, but as I remember it: * The Alpha bus architecture was used directly as the foundation of the Opteron and Athlon64 chips. * The Alpha chipsets were used for Opteron/Athlon64 (eg: irongate family) * A lot of the internals formed the foundation of Athlon64/Opteron, including the floating point system. * A bunch more foundational work that I wasn't clear on was used. Alpha was far more closely related to Athlon64/Opteron than a lot of people realized. I did the FreeBSD port to AMD64 and had a bunch of back-channel contacts with former co-workers who moved to AMD at the time. I had a steady stream of engineering samples, toys, documents and gossip. I still have a bunch of it around somewhere as souvenirs. Aside: My favorite "secret" was REX32 mode. It was a special mode where the CPU allowed access to the 64 bit registers in a 32 bit OS, think 32 bit WindowsXP. It did not require the OS to be aware of this. Context switching of this extra state was bolted onto the side of fxsave/fxrstor in reserved areas at the time. This mostly intended to allow things like hot spots of nvidia drivers and libraries to secretly work in 64 bit mode on Windows XP. I was told that it made significant improvements to benchmarks. Officially it was just an engineering test feature. Sadly, it was removed - for a number of reasons.
- hajile 3y ago
  Kinda. With Alpha, AMD got most of the scientists and Intel got all the IP. HyperTransport (and everything else copied from Alpha) was a cleanroom solution. Intel's Quickpath is closer to Alpha's tech (along with some claims that stuff like AVX came from upcoming Alpha SIMD designs). Alpha EV8 was planned to be very wide (8-issue) design with SMT and a massive SIMD unit. It was supposed to launch in 2004. Intel's chips didn't get that wide until Haswell in 2013.
wuming2 3y ago
At my university one assistant professor bought an Alpha powered PC. Don’t remember the brand but it was COTS as much as possible other students murmured. An attempt to find the economies of scale. Unfortunately the video card had no driver ready. So it sat under a desk unused for years. Being an embarrassing mistake at first, then forgotten and eventually obsolete.

vajrabum 3y ago

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that Intel bought the Alpha IP in 2001. I don't know, but I've heard that enabled Intel to greatly improve x86 performance.

derefr 3y ago

> They couldn’t build a high-end market at the scales they needed to support continued development at Intel’s pace. It's interesting how different things are today. If someone came along today with a new ground-up design for a CPU architecture + ISA, that was truly "better", all they would need to do is to show it to the cloud hardware vendors, and they'd likely get a billion dollars of runway shoved into their hands.

panick21_ 3y ago

AMD kicked Intels ass, Intel literally just used its monopoly and lawsuits against AMD.