Why Intel-Alpha buy makes sense

IF TRUE about Intel acquiring the Alpha technology and sales, Intel is purchasing valuable experience selling high end 64bit solutions, sophisticated multi-system clusters, UNIX datacenters and UNIX supercomputers -- and possibly a burgeoning relationship between Alpha and Oracle's 9i and RAC clustering products.

However there may be another twist involving Microsoft. Compaq only ended sales of Microsoft NT (SP6) on the Alpha 21264 EV6 cpu last year - and it's still supported as a static OS by Compaq Customer Services and Microsoft.

NT 32bit on 64bit Alpha actually ran very well and the Alphas provided a lot of sophisticated RAS capabilities to otherwise a basic NT server. Alpha/NT however competed with ProLiant/Intel/NT and Compaq wanted to focus on the UNIX market so Compaq ended NT development and sales. Microsoft has a team developing 64bit Windows OS (remember Dave Cutler now at MS formerly from the Digital OpenVMS team?).

Microsoft developed a 64bit Windows 2000 using Alpha servers over the last couple of years primarily with the idea of deploying on IA64.....the OS team still uses Alphas as well as the new IA64 servers.

Many current benchmarks (SpecWEB, Spec2000) show the current IA64 cpu as slower than the newer Alpha 21264a cpus (EV/68 833mhz/8mb cache - soon 1Ghz).

The stated future Alpha cpus designs (EV68 1ghz, EV7, EV8 etc) show dramatic performance and new more sophisticated capabilities again pushing beyond IA64 for key floating point performance, massive I/O, very large memory applications and database (14TB) requirements.

Future features planned include mutliple cpus on one board in a fault tolerant design, Symetrical Multitasking, etc.). So maybe through Intel Microsoft gets access to Alphas with OS code already developed -- targeting Alpha supercomputer and/or commercial multi-TB Oracle markets? And maybe Intel hedges on IA64's performance and place in the industry.

My 2cents.

Regards,

SR µ

See Also
Compaq Alpha up for grabs
Alpha: a proper little Marvel
Compaq Alpha team for sale