[PLUG] About alpha and what to do with mine...

[Jeff Schwaber]

> What went wrong?  Why did alpha seemingly fall out 
> of favor?  For a while it was difficult to find a 
> copy of Redhat for the alpha and even the alphalinux 
> site disappeared for a time.  Has Intel bought up 
> alpha or is it owned by HP?

Alpha was created by Digital, aka DEC, which was bought by Compaq, which
merged / was bought by HP. HP/Compaq declared the alpha line of
processors dead a few years ago, though there were engineers working on
it so that an update would be available to customers who were committed
to VMS and Digital Unix. But publicly, HP stated that future servers
would be Itaniums, because they were faster, and customers would be
migrated to Itanium asap. In addition, they said they were working to
port VMS and Digital Unix to Itanium. But when the EV7 came out, which
would have been the new Alpha, sometime last year, all benchmarks for it
were suppressed, and the alpha was again declared dead, with HP stating
that all servers would be Itanium based. A few folks I know at HP tell
me that that the EV7 kicked the Itanium II's ass so badly that HP higher
ups were rather embarrassed because they'd been touting the Itanium as
faster, which it wasn't. Though of course, HP denies any such things,
and claims no benchmarks were ever run.

All hail the Alpha. 'Tis dead. 

> Anyone have tips on finding programs for it?  You could
> get Windows NT for it for a while, but few programs
> worked where Microsoft oddly stopped supporting 
> NT4 alpha.  2000 was never officially released 
> on alpha, though I've heard it existed as a beta.
> I got mine from Enorex Microsystems which went out of
> business two years or so later.  Can alpha systems
> even be purchased anymore?  Mine was three years old
> in 1998, apparently it had been on the shelf that 
> long.  Just seems these systems didn't compete 
> affectively with the Pentium II, but why?

Debian is committed to the idea that all packages will run on all ports,
so that's your best bet. Anything in Debian stable will run on alpha, as
well as most stuff in testing and much of unstable. I had problems with
Gaim crashing fairly frequently when I ran debian testing on my alpha,
an EV56, but no major issues.

As for competing -- intel kicked their ass in price. Alpha was always an
expensive architecture, meant for servers, and intel was cheaper.
Despite the fact that an Alpha EV56 500 mhz can usually beat an Intel P3
at 1 Ghz, and an AMD Athlon at 1.3 Ghz[1], they were popular enough. Add
to that the fact that only some programs ran on them, and they were
esoteric enough to be barely profitable.

[1] I had all three of those systems last year, and used them
simultaneously. Those are personal observations of compile times, as
well as personal benchmarks achieved from running my own code on all
three machines.

Jeff