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I had a job in 2006 where the sysadmin ran the entire shop on a single OpenVMS server with two 500Mhz Alpha CPUs. It was our file server, AD server (somehow), DB server, web server, everything.

I just looked it up and that CPU came out in 1996, at the same time Intel released their 200Mhz Pentium. Alpha was way ahead of their time.

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Somewhere there is a blog about how that CPU had some hardware bug that prevented it from hitting 1ghz. if it didn't have that I'd be a 1ghz 64bit processor in a desktop early on. I really cannot find the blog. It was down a rabbit hole of how Intel AMD both picked some IBM mainframe to base their designs off but AMD went for an older quirky design but it allows a lot of advantages. Anyway, search engines are awful now.

Which CPU? One of the DEC Alphas?

I tried a few Kagi searches, but found Wikipedia claiming that at least one Alpha ran faster:

> The Alpha 21164 or EV5 became available in 1995 at processor frequencies of up to 333 MHz. In July 1996 the line was speed bumped to 500 MHz, in March 1998 to 666 MHz. Also in 1998 the Alpha 21264 (EV6) was released at 450 MHz, eventually reaching (in 2001 with the 21264C/EV68CB) 1.25 GHz.

Yes, and 64-bit!

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