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TBH, I'm not an expert on Alpha, and wow, as an embedded programmer by trade, that's really wacky way of handling memory access. I guess it made more sense in t
by fredoralive 2y ago
TBH, I'm not an expert on Alpha, and wow, as an embedded programmer by trade, that's really wacky way of handling memory access. I guess it made more sense in the minicomputer world where you control the whole stack, but as a more general purpose architecture its well, not the greatest is it.
- dfox 2y agoThere is a lot of good things to be said about Alpha and it is probably the most RISC of all 90's RISC ISAs, but the actual hardware is full of weirdness and all the real CPUs were deeply pipelined OoO designs (think Intel NetBurst) that prioritized high clock rates and huge straight-line throughput above all else (which is also why that ran really hot and could not be really scaled down for embedded use). Taking good ideas from that while discarding the “speed-demon” design is a part of why AMD become relevant again in 00's with amd64 cementing that position (but well, AMD K7 is very much Alpha-related design, to the extent that the chipsets are interchangeable between K7 and EV6. The interesting part of that is that these CPUs do not have FSB in the “bus” sense, but there is a point-to-point link between CPU and chipset).
- fredoralive 2y agoAMD using an Alpha bus for early Athlons feels like a weird lost opportunity. Cheap x86 aimed motherboards that can run also run Alpha chips with Windows 2000 + FX!32 for compatibility, it might’ve had a chance to shine, albeit a slight chance. Sadly by then Compaq had already boarded the Itanic…