ta152h :
Slow down there. Who bought DEC Alpha?
Are you really advancing an argument on one occurrence, and an occurrence that didn't even happen? That's a pretty weak argument.
Intel bought the manufacturing facilities from DEC, and HP owns the Alpha and all the other stuff from Compaq (Compaq bought DEC). So, if you've got a problem, blame it on HP.
The only thing AMD has to do with the Alpha is the Athlon used the EV6 bus, which was also used on the Alpha. It's not clear how using that ruined the Alpha.
Also, just so people get the right impression, the Alpha was nothing special, until it died. Then it became a legend. Most of the life of this processor it was a Pentium 4, but better. Very high clock speeds, huge amounts of power and heat, and low IPC. It eventually changed that, with lower clock speeds (relatively) and higher IPC. It changed leadership with the POWER chips from IBM all the time, and was not a clearly superior product, at all. There was nothing special about the instruction set; the processor was built by humans creating almost all the circuits instead of being done by computer. At this level of complexity, they'd never be able to do it anymore, anyway. By the time they were done hand coding it, it would be obsolete.
Are you really advancing an argument on one occurrence, and an occurrence that didn't even happen? That's a pretty weak argument.
Intel bought the manufacturing facilities from DEC, and HP owns the Alpha and all the other stuff from Compaq (Compaq bought DEC). So, if you've got a problem, blame it on HP.
The only thing AMD has to do with the Alpha is the Athlon used the EV6 bus, which was also used on the Alpha. It's not clear how using that ruined the Alpha.
Also, just so people get the right impression, the Alpha was nothing special, until it died. Then it became a legend. Most of the life of this processor it was a Pentium 4, but better. Very high clock speeds, huge amounts of power and heat, and low IPC. It eventually changed that, with lower clock speeds (relatively) and higher IPC. It changed leadership with the POWER chips from IBM all the time, and was not a clearly superior product, at all. There was nothing special about the instruction set; the processor was built by humans creating almost all the circuits instead of being done by computer. At this level of complexity, they'd never be able to do it anymore, anyway. By the time they were done hand coding it, it would be obsolete.
AMD licensed the EV6 bus protocol from DEC yes, but they also hired the entire (nearly) Alpha engineer team right as DEC was discontinuing it's processor business. The internals of the original Athlon are based heavily on the Alpha processor design, their so similar that you could drop an Alpha CPU into the Irongate chipset and it would work. HP actually made a few systems built this way. As a processor Alpha's were actually pretty good, they just couldn't keep up with IBM or Sun + Solaris in the specialized processing world and x86 had taken over the commodity server world. The Stars architecture is a direct descendant of the older Alpha design's.