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If only the Alpha had hung on.

I have an AlphaServer in my collection (DS10.) For a 25+ year old system, it still feels pretty snappy!

I think I read at one point alpha had a 64bit cpu in the 90s that could have hit 1ghz but some bug held it back. I am having so much trouble finding these articles and stories about processors these days with AI and shitified Google.

The other one I can't find I swear was a former AMD engineer talking about how Intel bet the farm on one ibm mainframe design but AMD went with an older architecture (under the hood of x86 for both) that was harder to deal with but ultimately runs faster and that's how we got ryzen. Maybe I'm just losing my mind.

I think the "Jim Keller" story around Zen is a bet on modularity, core-complexes, then chiplets. Smaller, less monolithic designs and a clean re-design of the x86 cores for compacity, ease of validation and scalability (in core count).

My college was a DEC shop; I learned programming and how to use unix in labs full of dumb X terminals connected to Alpha servers.

Still have a lot of nostalgia for the architecture.

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