End of the Alpha CPU (was: IBM Buys Rational for $2.1Billion!)

[Jerry Feldman]

HP codeveloped the IA-64 (Now the Itanium family) with the plan to replace 
the PA-RISC chip. The PA-RISC was upgraded to 64 bits several years ago, 
but most of the implementations are 32 bit. The Alpha was killed by Compaq 
management (eg. the EV8) because the development cost was prohibitive. Back 
in August, 2001, when this was announced, the forecast that the IA-64 would 
surpass the Alpha sometime in 2004 or 2005. The EV79 version of the Alpha 
is the last version planned to be released. The EV8 team was sold to Intel. 
Without searching for them, the recent benchmarks of the McKinley (eg. 
Itanium 2) have been pretty decent.
bscott at ntisys.com wrote:

>   I find it interesting that HP plans to dump both the DEC Alpha and their
> own PA-RISC line of microprocessors, in favor of Intel's IA-64 "Itanium"  
> line.  I still have not heard anything really good about the Itanium.  In
> fact, the best I have heard is that it does not suck as much as it used to.  
> Has IA-64 really gotten so much better that is can seriously be considered
> as a replacement for the PA-RISC and Alpha chips?
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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