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It was also planned for a world where high-end CPUs were differentiated by their ability to run floating-point-heavy workloads with relatively predictable memor
by twoodfin 3mo ago
It was also planned for a world where high-end CPUs were differentiated by their ability to run floating-point-heavy workloads with relatively predictable memory access patterns.
The rise of the web—and databases behind it—as the dominant high-end, high-margin workload obsoleted that assumption.
There’s a great presentation floating around where a Compaq-acquired-DEC engineer is trying to justify how great the OpenVMS port from Alpha to Itanium is going, despite benchmarks showing Alpha smoking Itanium running Apache.
- eej71 3mo agoI worked for a company that had a fairly large OpenVMS installation and had to make the transition from Alpha to Itanium. It required a considerable amount of work and the early iterations of Itanium did not provide a clear performance improvement over the final Alpha EV7z that we had been using in some GS1280s. Going by my faulty memory, I'd say it wasn't until Tukwila that it was a clear win over Alpha EV7z. By the time Tukwila arrived, it was pretty clear that Itanium's goose was already cooked.
- p_l 3mo agoEV7 were introduced after customers refused to upgrade to Integrity over crap performance.
- wbl 3mo agoIf only the Alpha had hung on.
- icedchai 3mo agoI have an AlphaServer in my collection (DS10.) For a 25+ year old system, it still feels pretty snappy!
- hypercube33 3mo agoI think I read at one point alpha had a 64bit cpu in the 90s that could have hit 1ghz but some bug held it back. I am having so much trouble finding these articles and stories about processors these days with AI and shitified Google. The other one I can't find I swear was a former AMD engineer talking about how Intel bet the farm on one ibm mainframe design but AMD went with an older architecture (under the hood of x86 for both) that was harder to deal with but ultimately runs faster and that's how we got ryzen. Maybe I'm just losing my mind.
- touisteur 3mo agoI think the "Jim Keller" story around Zen is a bet on modularity, core-complexes, then chiplets. Smaller, less monolithic designs and a clean re-design of the x86 cores for compacity, ease of validation and scalability (in core count).
- shawn_w 3mo agoMy college was a DEC shop; I learned programming and how to use unix in labs full of dumb X terminals connected to Alpha servers. Still have a lot of nostalgia for the architecture.