Re: Alpha remembrance day

Andrew wrote:
So who would Digital have sold FAB capacity to?

I have been told some time ago that AMD had been very interestedbut that
Digital intentionally made it diffidult for AMD to buy FAB capacity for
Hudson. In the end, DEC got its hands on the Arm, built StrongArm and
used Hudson to build those chips. But that wasn't anywhere near enough
to fill the shoes that Alpha had been expected to fill.

That and the rather grandiose plans for Alpha meant that Palmer had to
reserve FAB capacity ofr Alpha. Its rather tricky just to turn a
contracted FAB run off in order to make your own units if demand rises.

Palmer took steps to prevent Alpha from growing, such as preventing it
from competing against Wintel. And by 1996, Palmer was already talking
to Pfeiffer about Compa buying Digital and Pfeiffer made it very clear
that he wasn't interested in the FAB, so from that point on, there was
no point in trying to fix Hudson to get more customers.

inherited was the decision to FAB Alpha in house. The cost of designing
Alpha and then fabricating Alpha proved to be business decisions which
bled Digital dry.

Yes and no. It was the mismanagement and refusal to take on more work
which mad Husdon bleed money profusely. And Palmer hid that fact for a
very long time. I think it was Terry Shannon who got the scoop that
Hudson had been bleeding far more money than had been previously though,
and this was at the time Digital donated Hudson as a gift to Intel to
thank Intel for stealing Alpha intellectual property.

Note that Digital made a lot of its own chips. And had Digital
succesfully marketed its FAB capabilities and made it easy for others to
use it, it might have been a succesful enterprise.

By the time Alpha arrived many of the RISC processors Alpha was
designed to compete against were in their 2 and or third iteration.
MIPS had gone from R2000 to R3000 to R4000. Sun had gone from SPARC v7
to SPARC v8 etc.

Yes, but Alpha was designed from scratch with new knowldge/technologies
that allowed it to scale much higher than existing risc processors. And
consider that when Alpha came out, HP pissed in its pants and decided to
abandon its own PA-Risc and beg Intel to design something that could
compete against Alpha.

Alpha may have been a late comer to the RISC party, but it was
definitely a class above the rest from a technology point of view.

You have to remember that the early 1990's was an period where Alpha
was one of a number of processor architectures trying to unseat x86.

It can be argued that Alpha succeeded. Consider the Pentium III which
contains a lot of "Alpha Inside"... :-)

The reality is that whatever Palmer did he started from the standpoint
of having been delt a really terrible hand of cards.

Loy Gerstner inherited an IBM that was months away from bankrupcy and
processes already begun to sell parts of IBM off to pay the creditors.
He got an IBM in a much worse condition than Palmer got Digital. Palmer
didn't inherit a healthy Digital. But he worsoned the situation BIG
TIME.

Gerstner focused on keeping IBM to gether and fixing PROBLEMS. Palmer
knew only how to change the logo to have a round dot on the I and a
slightly different shade of red, and of course, slash and burn employees
and products, followed by a never ending game of musical chairs at the
top whenever he had to make financial announcements that had bad news.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Alpha remembrance day
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  • Re: Alpha remembrance day
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  • Re: Alpha remembrance day
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