DEC Aplha

[itim100]

What is this thing?

My friend's dad is a engineer and one day he brought home this monstrous case and said that it was old, but was an Alpha, so it could crunch numbers faster than a 1000mhz PIII (the bad @ss of that time). What speeds/evolutions and such of the Alphas occured, and how fast were they effectively?

[Aslan]

Here (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha) is some general info about the DEC Alpha. I believe that the fastest Alpha CPU created was 1.25 GHZ, and according to the link, systems will be based on the Alpha until 2004.
Also, as the link mentions, the Alpha is 64 bit; I remember that the older versions, up to 400mhz (not sure about the newer ones) could run Windows, but only in 32 bit compatibility mode, which killed half their performance.

[NookieN]

Unfortunately HP has pretty much killed any historical documentation of the Alpha. Here's a somewhat more technical description if you're interested:

http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/jbayko/cpu5.html#Sec5Part5

Basically the Alpha was all about gaining performance and efficiency through the simplicity of its design. It was RISC based (common now, but in '92 Intel and co. were still making CISC cores), 64-bit (though not in quite the same way as today's 64-bit CPUs), and very scalable. The fabrication process used by DEC was also tailored to suit the Alpha, which gave it a boost early on.

What I find particularly interesting about the Alpha is that Microsoft even bothered to make a version of Windows NT for it, even though only about 500k chips were sold.

[Gnufsh]

THe Alpha was an awesome chip. When intel bought it a coup,e of years ago, development mostly stopped, and last year I heard that they were still giving itanium a run for its money. I've been wanting to get my hands on one of those...