Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

I still run an AlphaServer DS25. It's amazingly quick, even in 2020. It outperforms CPUs which came years after it.

People sometimes think that the market caused the Alpha to fail. Really, it was Intel. They wanted Itanic to succeed so much that they made a deal with HP to end the Alpha prematurely, even though demand for Alpha systems was high.

Even after HP announced that the Alpha would stop being developed, Alphas were being sold as a high end systems for all sorts of uses and had many entries in the Top 500List of supercomputers - Alpha systems were four of the top ten on the planet in November, 2002, which was after HP announced they wanted to transition from Alpha to Itanic.

My AlphaServer DS25 is beautiful hardware. Everything in the machine is manufactured to a standard we just don't see any more.

View on HN

In interviewed at Intel & DEC in '95, worked at DEC 96-97

Corporate infighting, incompetent sales, and misaligned vision pervaded the culture. It didn't help that PPro came out of left field and took everybody by surprise

When I interviewed at Intel in '95, they were absolutely giddy with how they stole Alpha's thunder. DEC was a better geographic choice for me, and, well...

HP didn't come into the picture until long after - DEC sold to Compaq in '98, Compaq to HP in '02. The race was over at least 7 years before that.

Edit: Not to mention the absolutely hostile stance DEC took to MS wrt NT. Due to Cutler's involvement with NT, DEC sued MSFT and somehow thought that would make MSFT become a loyal partner.

I remember Office 97 performing terribly on Alpha. We sent a compiler guy there to figure out why; turns out the Office team had a single Alpha in their pipeline, set to compile -O0, and pretty much said "this is there to check the lawsuit checkmark"

>turns out the Office team had a single Alpha in their pipeline, set to compile -O0, and pretty much said "this is there to check the lawsuit checkmark"

what does this mean? compile -O0? lawsuit checkmark?

-O0 means compiling without optimization. Presumably they were contractually required to have a version Office for Alpha, so they did the minimum effort thing to produce one.

Exactly this

I bet the Office software was riddled with C++ undefined behavior. The Alpha was one of the closest CPUs to the mythical Deathstation 9000 which will destroy you if you make even one mistake in your code.

Like Itanium, compiling for Alpha with -O3 would expose you to large amounts of bugs in your code and bugs in the compiler too.

> People sometimes think that the market caused the Alpha to fail. Really, it was Intel. They wanted Itanic to succeed so much that they made a deal with HP to end the Alpha prematurely, even though demand for Alpha systems was high.

This is misleading at best - "The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium)

A more realistic view would see it as a casualty of the DEC->Compaq->HP merger sequence, with HP long committed to Itanium as the successor to its own PA-Risc architecture.

My dad worked in the Alpha memory dept at DEC / Compaq / HP. They continued supporting Alpha servers long after they stopped selling them to new customers. Wikipedia says 2007 which sounds about right. Customers spent hundreds of thousands on these systems and, from what I was told, really liked them.

They still performed well when they ended support and laid off everyone on the Alpha teams, including my dad.

What OS do you run on the AlphaServer?

Not OP, but I used RH 6 Linux on mine, and it worked like a charm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com