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Alpha sold off to Intel :(

B

BurntKooshie

Diamond Member
So who cares, right? The problem is this leaves Intel, Sun, and IBM as the only ones left in the big 64-bit world. Sun's UltraSparc architecture provides less performance than a MIPS chip with minimal support for future growth. IBM's going the super high-end with the POWER4, and it basically leaves Intel as the main big guy over the next few years in the 64-bit world.

Of course, those MIPS chips will be replaced by IA-64 chips (that's been the plan for awhile), and the same with HP PA-RISC chips.

The Itanium isn't all that when it comes to integer code (despite all the hoopla, VLIW doesn't seem to fit for a general purpose CPU, at least, not yet, as the compilers still aren't up to snuff....). What I keep hearing is that McKinely will be all that (I hope so😀), but, of course, the only problem is....where will the competition be? Yes, Alpha technologies will continue until completion, but after that, no more new technologies...MIPs is dead, and so is PA-RISC, and UltraSparc offers terrible performance compared to the alternatives (but has a nice large software base....hymmm....kinda like x86 😛).

So does this affect anyone here, or have they all left in favor of a less inflamatory crowd?
 
seems the goverment might have something to say.... i'm surprise they'd let a deal like that fly.

overall it seems like a bad idea, since intel is buying alpha just to kill it..


in the end the consumer loses....
 
Why wouldn't they let it fly? Look at who's in office.... laissez faire attitudes in office don't bode well for keeping healthy competition 🙁

The worst part is that Intel only mentioned the continuance of EV7...which means that EV8 is dead as a door-nail:|:|:|. That was looking (note: LOOKING) to be an amazing chip, 4-way SMT on an 8-issue Superscalar....*sighs*.
 
Yeah, those Republicans/Conservatives are probably cheering Intel on as they see their stock rise.

Wasn't there some controversy surrounding a government official with intel stock?

Hahahahahahahaha!!!
 
Can we get a petition or something to stop this? Ack, i'll just float over to using a Dual Mac. Its my only way out 🙁
 
:|:|:|:|:|
This bites...I was really interested in the EV8 (from a computer architecture standpoint...not that I would ever have seen one).

This looks like the end of the classic RISC architectures...Power4 is only aimed at the REALLY high-end, and PA-RISC and MIPS have been dropped in favor of Itanium. Only Sun has a chance by promoting the complete hardware/software package...they've been successful doing so despite US-III's inferior performance, but it remains to be seen if they can last against the Itanium/MS powerhouse...
 


<< Why wouldn't they let it fly? Look at who's in office.... laissez faire attitudes in office don't bode well for keeping healthy competition >>

Sorry guys, regulation isn't always the answer. It seems many like to blame GWB for any problem at hand.

I agree that Alpha getting bought out isn't a good thing, but as beautiful as the architecture was, it wasn't supported by a good business plan/marketing. Another Betamax/Amiga story.
 
You'd be surprised at how well Sun can do.
The UltraSPARC may not be the highest performing CPU (and if we want to dump on Sun, Solaris is a pretty bad Unix 😉) but it's very very scalable. You can link up multiple Sun CPUs quite well.

But yes you are right...this isn't really very good 🙁
 
The biggest part of Sun's systems are the software base, I believe. Scalability is another huge factor.

Of course, EV7 was designed for &quot;glueless SMP&quot; as they called it....but all it really meant was...MASS SCALABILITY 🙁. Sun systems have scalability and software base, but I'm not sure that is enough to keep them going indefinetly...at some point, they're going to have to show a decently performing chip in order to compete, now that Intel has it's weight behind 64-bit-ness.

Software base, I believe, was a major sore point of Alpha....and when NT support was cut, that was a big, big hint that things were not well with Alpha 🙁

It really sucks too, as with the newest compilers, and the SPIKE development tool, SPEC scores jump to ~ Itanium FP performance (above in peak).

Aaaaaaaieeeeeee......
 
Does someone have linkage to an article/announcement? (Checked Intel's main site nothing obvious)

Thorin
 
I was checking out some stock quotes and found this news under INTC. It seems that Compaq agreed to phase out the Alpha's in favor of Intel's Itanium.
link

Maybe e-phex is correct about Intel trying to kill off the Alpha.:frown:
 
I wonder if cost was also a problem with Alpha. Their chips tended to be complex with large caches so die size/yield was a problem?

At least they brought the EV6 bus that AMD seems to be successful with. So far, I have not heard any rumors that Intel can/will try to monkey with the bus licensing.
 
The current Alpha is much smaller than the Itanium, even on an inferior process technology. I'm not quite sure of the die size, but I'm tempted to think it's somewhere around 200 square mm's. The Itanium is huge.

Alpha didn't &quot;bring&quot; it, it was more because the courts forced Alpha to license their technologies during the whole DEC/Compaq - Intel thing, where Intel bought a fab from DEC.
 
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