DEC Alpha

[Achim Gratz]

Eric S. Raymond via devel writes:
> Achim Gratz via devel <devel at ntpsec.org>:
>> I visited DEC in Palo Alto one time and got to see the very first Alpha
>> mainboard (with an alcohol heatpipe made from a glass tube atop the
>> CPU).
>
> Damn shame about the Alpha. That was a good design that DEC utterly botched the
> positioning and marketing of.

Actually, as originally defined it had more problems than it solved.
That was taken care of in later iterations for the most part, but by
then it was already on the downhill slope.

[…]
> But a few years later some of the Alpha designers took their lessons to another
> company and it became ARM.  So there's that.

ARM predates Alpha by almost a decade and its namesake development
company (Acorn RISC Machines) was founded far away from any DEC
operation.  I don't think anyone of the founding team had anything to do
with DEC.  The bunch of designers you remember are most likely the folks
that DEC had to give up to Intel while settling some some lawsuit whose
details escape me.  They've already had developed StrongARM (under
architectural license by ARM) at DEC and that then became Intel XScale.
When DEC finally folded into Compaq another wave of CPU designers went
to Intel AFAIK and may have been a strong influence to pursue the "speed
demon" line of CPU architecture that Intel followed for quite some time.


Regards,
Achim.
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