Re: Alpha remembrance day

I recall at the time every manufacturer (pretty much...there might be
an exception that slips my mind) was claiming 64 bit addressing was of no value. This however silenced once the point sunk in that a number of
database operations were dramatically faster on 64 bit machines (in particular on Alpha) than any previous 32 bit ones. The most surprising
example I recall was that 5 way joins (and yes, these do get used) ran
something like 250 TIMES faster (25,000%) than on 32 bit boxes, regardless of the amount of tuning one tried. In those days (c. 1992) DBMS vendors would beat one another up over the usual 20% performance improvements, and the difference was large enough to make it very very clear that simply claiming nobody had uses for the things would no longer wash.

Nowadays of course, with J.Q. Public working with ever larger pictures or sound files, the limitations of a 32 bit address space are obvious to a much larger population. Still, even in 1992 many enterprises were acutely aware of the advantages of much faster databases. Had corporate inertia been less and perhaps had issues of brand loyalty not interfered (seeing by then the notion that VAX MIPs were very expensive compared with 68000 series or other MIPS had become widespread) Alpha might well have "taken over the world". I recall though being puzzled that DEC emphasized these figures so little at the time. The company was superb technically, but never did market its offerings very well. Alas that its successors have had similar problems.

Glenn Everhart


Andrew wrote:
Hoff Hoffman wrote:
Andrew wrote:

Again you are mistaken, Sun spent a great deal of time worrying about
.

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