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Comment by mosburger | Hacker News Reader

My first industry job was a co-op on the DEC Multia team. Multia was another attempt to lure people over from the VMS/Unix world by bundling an X Server and system administration software along with Windows NT.

While I was there, we switched over from Alpha to Intel because the performance just wasn't there on Alpha - IIRC the 75MHz Intels blew the 233MHz Alphas out of the water. Most of us chalked it up to the fact that Microsoft wasn't super interested or able to optimize Windows to run on Alpha.

As sort of a "stunt" I got the newer versions of the Multia software that were only available on Intel to run on the old Alpha Multias under a (then internal project) emulator called FX!32

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Getting performance out of Alphas usually depended heavily on the compiler, and, really, only the DEC compiler really made it shine. GCC was notoriously bad at generating optimized binaries (circa ~2.95), at least compared to compiling the same code on the DEC compiler suite.

I'm sort of half surprised you're recalling an Intel 75MHz beating a 233MHz Alpha, but, sort of half not. Depends on the type of software you were running I guess. Or do you mean just the general system responsiveness?

I did a lot of work on Alphas w/ Digital UNIX, then Tru64, around the 1999-2002 timeframe, and they were so much fun.

The Multia used the cut-down LCA4 or LCA45 (Low Cost Alpha) CPU, the 21066 or 21066A. These apparently performed worse than the more expensive EV4 or EV45 parts.

Also, the compilers on Windows NT were from DEC, at least to some extent. In the NT 3.50 SDK there is a manual from DEC explaining what the compiler was - a customised Microsoft C/C++ frontend combined with a port of the GEM backend from Unix or VMS.

the 21066 chips were cache and memory bandwidth starved compared to normal EV4 setup, and IIRC many didn't have the larger cache option. Reports seem to indicate that 233MHz models effectively were about Pentium 100MHz speed in integer ops.

I don't know how many EV4 systems shipped with 64bit system bus, but by 1994 AlphaStation 255 models shipped with 128bit system bus and 1MByte L2 cache, and they weren't particularly high end (I found one that was used by Best Buy to run VHS rental shop...)

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