Alpha for consoles?

[nelg]

Would the Alpha architecture been a better choice for the next generation consoles? IIRC it was very good and clocked better than other RISC designs. Furthermore since the IP seems to be lying dormant perhaps it could have been licenced cheaply. What benefits would it have over the PPC?

 

[Carl B]

Alpha was/is awesome - and now there is talk that it might be revived under HP's new CEO.

 

[Bobbler]

Alpha was/is awesome - and now there is talk that it might be revived under HP's new CEO.

Thought Intel had to buy Alpha out?

I can't really remember the entire details of the Alpha 'situation'... does HP actually own the IP of the archetecture now?

Would be kinda cool -- more the merrier.

 

[Farid]

/summons: aaronspink

 

[j^aws]

Geez, yeah, my first Unix (Digital) was on a DEC Alpha...good times! 8)

 

[Carl B]

Alpha was/is awesome - and now there is talk that it might be revived under HP's new CEO.

Thought Intel had to buy Alpha out?

I can't really remember the entire details of the Alpha 'situation'... does HP actually own the IP of the archetecture now?

Would be kinda cool -- more the merrier.

HP claimed the rights to Alpha when they bought Compaq; I do know that there was a move recently with the commitment to Itanium that seemed to put the last nail in the coffin; but now, who knows....?

 

[Bobbler]

Alpha was/is awesome - and now there is talk that it might be revived under HP's new CEO.

Thought Intel had to buy Alpha out?

I can't really remember the entire details of the Alpha 'situation'... does HP actually own the IP of the archetecture now?

Would be kinda cool -- more the merrier.

HP claimed the rights to Alpha when they bought Compaq; I do know that there was a move recently with the commitment to Itanium that seemed to put the last nail in the coffin; but now, who knows....?

Well... Didn't HP recently ditch Itanium for the most part?

More power to HP if they can bring back Alpha from the grave. I certainly miss hearing about Alpha (and Sparc for that matter -- although sparc is still around...).

 

[WillFa]

HP just decided to kill off the processor line since they never could get any market adoption for them. They still own it, however.
Cnet reporting on HP's decisions.

 

[Iron Tiger]

Is the Alpha EV6 bus still in use on the K8 platform, or has that been replaced by HyperTransport?

 

[nelg]

Would anyone care to dig up some old comparisons with the PPC? IIRC it was the first processor to break the 300Mhz barrier. My thinking WRT its use in consoles was related to the fact that it seemed to be able to clock higher than its competition. This would benefit Sony as it seems the cells clock speed is limited by that of the PPE. For MS they would have a familiar instruction set (NT for Alpha). Does any one know its comparative strengths or weaknesses?

 

[jvd]

Is the Alpha EV6 bus still in use on the K8 platform, or has that been replaced by HyperTransport?

na eve 6 ended with the athlon xps . Socket a was the last platform to use it .

 

[nelg]

BYTE Oct 94

The 21164 contains four execution units and can issue up to four instructions--two integer and two floating-point--per clock cycle. The two integer units are not identical, although each has an ALU and both perform loads. One unit--E0 in DEC nomenclature--has the necessary circuitry to perform stores, shifts, and integer multiplies. The other unit, E1, handles branch processing in addition to common integer instructions.

 

[Farid]

I still, to this day, believe that one the reason Alpha went down under is because its creators themselves couldn't keep up with the impossible to remember name convention. I mean, come on, Alpha 21164.

 

[stepz]

My thinking WRT its use in consoles was related to the fact that it seemed to be able to clock higher than its competition.

It clocked higher because it was really-really well hand tuned to the manufacturing process.

Does any one know its comparative strengths or weaknesses?

Well a major weakness is that nobody is designing new Alpha cores anymore. Another weakness is that Alpha cores are quite big powerhungry beasts - not really good for embedding in consoles. Other than that atleast the 21264 was on helluva core, having undergone relatively minor changes (newer process, more cache, integrated memorycontroller) its performance is still up there with the best.

 

[Carl B]

Well if they really do go about tweaking and implementing the Tarantula architecture, as the rumors discuss, that would certainly make things interesting in the high-end computing space. I personally don't think HP will revive it, but not because it's not worth reviving - I just think too much water has gone under the bridge with the whole Itanium drama.

I'm sure we'll hear more on it in one way or the other in the next couple of months - whether it be confirmation of it's resurrection or it's burial.

 

[j^aws]

I retract my statement about first using Digital Unix on DEC Alpha's. I've since found that it was on DEC Stations which we're apparently Mips based that later became Alpha's... oh well...

Anyway, as to CELLs PPE and XecPU cores being Alpha's, I don't think you can make a case on tech that's not in production. I think for STI, there was no option but to use a Power based core for the PPEs, if only on IBM's insistence!

But for MS, they had other options (apart from x86) but they chose one which already had the NT kernel compiled for an existing ISA. IIRC, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC and there may have been others...