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Thanks for mentioning that. You sent me down a brief rabbit-hole of nostalgia looking for the EV4/EV5 differences. If anybody else wants to go down that rabbit-hole here's where I ended-up: http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/alpha_21164_21164pc...

Interestingly, LZ4 works mostly on nibble and byte level without much bit-twiddling.

Also, when was the last Alpha built? About ten years ago?

It's fine for OpenBSD or NetBSD to support it, but Microsoft has not supported it in a long time.

Was axp even the weakest of the four windows architectures for this task? PPC and MIPS can leave the bit twiddler scratching their heads, too.

Problem with original Alpha is that accessing memory as anything other than aligned 32b or 64b words (yes, including bytes) counts as bit-twiddling because only load/store instructions that it has operate on these two word sizes.

I can't remember any other non-niche architecture with 8*2^n word size that shares this (mis-)feature. (I suspect that Cray 1 and it's derivates also share this, but that probably counts as niche architecture)