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Alpha processor family

Introduction

These are currently the fastest processors available and they have a nice, very pure RISC instruction set. They are fully 64-bit but are quite wastefull with memory space and energy. (Now: 199802)

It's future

An Alpha afficionado (even more than I am ;-) resented the last sentense and wrote me:
This is now obsolete speculation. Alpha has been given a long life from Compaq, Tandem and is being helped by Samsung, API and soon AMD and IBM.See www.alphant.com/ for additional details and links to many other sites with information on the future longevity of the Alpha processor.Aaron Sakovich <sakovich@hsv.sungardtrust.com>

Well I'm not going to retract my statement. I think that Compaq grew big (biggest PC maker!) because of adhering to the 'Intel standard' and will not waste money by having to maintain two major product lines (one not even of their own making). Things like these killed DEC. Compaq will most likely follow a policy of being friendly to old DEC customers (including the stubborn Alpha users), so they can make them new offers and gradually convince them to use the Pentium and soon Merced.
By the way I'm typing this under DEC/Unix 3.2 on a (company that I worked for) self-build 166 MHz Alpha PC, but my new computer is an AMD K6-2 333MHz (=Pentium) running under NT 4.0 (and Linux soon). Just to try out NT I bought a cheap (Alpha) Multia for fun earlier...
Of course the Alpha is a much nicer processor but standardization and cost effectiviness are unfortunately probably worth much more...
(199812/Jaap)

In the mean time I was already proven partly right: Compaq and Microsoft have stopped development of NT for the Alpha architecture in the autumn of 1999. Compaq however still stays developing new Alpha's for it's higher end computers. Probably the faith of the Alpha now depends on how succesful the Merced will prove to be.

Books

More information