What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2038

Eric Chomko

It strikes me that you have a very narrow definition of success. Alpha made money hand over fist, DEC's dissolution had very little to do with Alpha's success or "failure".

Neither the PowerPC nor Pentium made significant in-roads into the Technical computing market until very recently. The Alpha competed against POWER, MIPS and SPARC, and the P6 (Pentium Pro) derivatives. POWER != PowerPC.

Granted, BlueGene-L has proven to be an Ace up the Sleeve for IBM in the technical computing market.

SNIP

To be blunt DEC's Intel boxes were --ing awful and grossly over priced.

Sun are going AMD64. Intel is *way* behind on power density, scalability, RAS and sustained performance. AMD64's feature set bears strong similarities to EV7.

I think you are pinning the tail on the wrong donkey here. If you want to rip a hole in chips orientated towards technical computing perhaps you should take a good hard look at the Itanic, pay particular attention to road map. Take note of the rapidly falling clock speeds, increasing lead times, and the axed designs.

be shipping right up to the last iteration of IA-64, not bad for a "wannabe". Also note that the Alpha still has a placing in the Top-500 list despite a 7 year old core. That should speak volumes in a trade that is used to 2x speed ups every year.

Cheers, Rupert