Posted by Lammy 20 hours ago
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...
It also seems faith in IA64 was the meteor that killed most of these self developed RISC architectures.
That worked out swimmingly for Alpha... >sigh<
I never programmed Alpha assembly, so I don't really have a feel for the architecture. I did deploy some Alpha-based boxes running NT, and they were very nice. They didn't feel pieced-together like x86 servers did.
DEC had a moment between 1990-92 when they did pretty good in PC market. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU
Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...
Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
'As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.'
@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and it worked, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
What is well known however, is that a bunch of Alpha engineers wound up at AMD, and a lot of that DNA went into the OG Athlon
> Intel developed QPI at its Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center (MMDC) by
> members of what had been the Alpha Development Group, which Intel had acquired
> from Compaq and HP and in turn originally came from Digital Equipment
> Corporation (DEC).[8] Its development had been reported as early as 2004
QPI was Intel's answer to the competition AMD's Athlon / HyperTransport had created
Dr Dobbs has been gone for 12, which is still a long time, but when I first read the intro my brain transposed the two and I had a proper freak out before I realized what I'd done.
"According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
While AArch64 has been in the top supercomputer, a phone running on Alpha was not.
For this scalability problem, it deserved to die.
The issue was that DEC lacked the resources to run a completely new microarchitecture design to target low-power platforms, and the failure was trying to push an extreme performance chip into low-power envelope instead of designing a new one.
AFAIK with ARM the difference is that they started with low-power underpowered chip and modified it to bring the performance up.
You'd have probably similar issues trying to make a phone using Fujitsu A64FX (the supercomputer ARM) into low-power chip.
I'm also assuming that ARM code density was better than Alpha (conditional opcodes being a major contributor).
"Well, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year...
"Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of highly combined... And then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto, we were just gonna start an Alpha project."
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
StrongARM was developed in partnership with ARM, not starting from zero, applying some of the techniques Digital developed with Alpha to ARM - reputedly creating the idea that ARM could be fast at all
"Meanwhile, the engineering team's predictions about the relentless march of CMOS proved true. By 1991, the NVAX was also on the market, offering roughly the same performance for a tiny fraction of the cost and size. At lower performance settings the same design was available in desktop form, outperforming all previous VAX machines. The 9000 managed not only to lose billions of dollars, but also led to the ending of several much more promising designs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000
DEC also lost Dave Cutler's team over PRISM, which was also a deep cut. Deeper than the ECL disaster? Debatable.
DEC had no hope in the ECL money furnace and the loss of the VMS architect.
As for Alpha, funnily enough the first few years I knew of it, I knew only of NT use with them, because that's what the R&D institute my father worked at had.