Digital Equipment Corporation
                                          Maynard, Massachusetts 01754-2571


                    NEWEST ALPHA MICROPROCESSOR HITS 500MHz,
                   ALPHA TOPS FOR WINDOWS NT VISUAL COMPUTING

           Alpha Family Leads in Performance, Gets New, Lower Pricing


MAYNARD, Mass., July 8, 1996 -- Digital Equipment Corporation strengthened
its four-year claim to the world's fastest and highest-performance
microprocessors with today's announcement of 500MHz and 433MHz versions of its
Alpha 21164 RISC microprocessor. With peak execution rates of up to 2 BIPS,
these top-performing chips push the performance envelope for visual computing
applications such as video conferencing, 3-D modeling, video editing,
multimedia authoring, image rendering, and animation.

Performance of the new Alpha 21164-500MHz chip is estimated at 15.4 SPECint95
and 21.1 SPECfp95, making it the industry's highest-performance RISC or CISC
microprocessor for both integer and floating point operations. The Alpha
21164-433MHz chip is estimated to deliver 13.3 SPECint95 and 18.4 SPECfp95.


Superior Benchmark Results

The Alpha 21164 product family's superior performance enables it to handle the
tremendous workload in 3-D graphics and motion video faster than competing
platforms, including those with special multimedia instructions, with CPU
power to spare for other tasks. In tests using a suite of 3-D image rendering
benchmarks from Softimage, a 366MHz Alpha XL PC performed, on average, 31
percent faster than a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 Extreme workstation, and 72
percent faster than an Intergraph TDZ 300/GLZ system based on the 150MHz
Pentium Pro chip.

"In those same tests, we expect a 500MHz Alpha system to run 75 percent faster
than the SGI workstation and well over twice as fast as the Intergraph TDZ 300
system," said William N. Johnson, vice president of marketing at Digital
Semiconductor, a Digital Equipment Corporation business.


Industry Accolades for Alpha

"Digital's 500MHz Alpha 21164 should keep Alpha in the performance lead, even
as Intel rolls out its 0.28-micron process for Pentium Pro in 1997," said
MicroDesign Resources analyst Linley Gwennap. "Alpha performance has increased
by an impressive 70 percent since the Pentium Pro was announced last fall."

According to analyst Tim Sloane of the Aberdeen Group, "There is an increasing
trend for high-end graphics, imaging, and video software vendors to port their
applications to Windows NT and to offer desktop implementations via the
Internet. This trend presents an excellent opportunity for Digital to position
Alpha as the price/performance benchmark in a new market segment for the
professional Windows desktop."

Glenn Campbell, Area 51 visual effects supervisor for the futuristic
television feature, "Space -- Above and Beyond," said, "Alpha systems give us
the best bang for the buck. I can buy five Alphas and put five animators to
work for the price of one Silicon Graphics Indigo Extreme machine with
software and licensing."


New Pricing for Alpha Chips

Alpha 21164 microprocessors are now available in the following range of speeds
and price points:


     Processor                    Price (1,000 units)


     Alpha 21164-300MHz           $695
     Alpha 21164-366MHz           $950
     Alpha 21164-433MHz           $1,492


The above microprocessors are all available for shipment. The 500MHz chip is
sampling now and will be available in September. In addition, Alpha 21164
board products, featuring standard PC components and form factors, are also
available now.

Digital Semiconductor, a Digital Equipment Corporation business headquartered
in Hudson, Massachusetts, designs, manufactures and markets industry-leading
semiconductor products including Alpha microprocessors and PCI chips for
networking, bridging, and multimedia, plus low-power StrongARM microprocessors
under license from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
and Samsung Electronics Company Ltd. are alternate sources for Alpha
microprocessors. World Wide Web site:

            http://www.digital.com/info/semiconductor

Digital Equipment Corporation is the world's leader in open client/server
solutions from personal computing to integrated worldwide information systems.
Digital's Intel and Alpha platforms, storage, networking, software and
services, together with industry-focused solutions from business partners,
help organizations compete and win in today's global marketplace.

                                    ####

Note to Editors:  Digital, Digital Semiconductor, and the Digital logo are
                  trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation.

                  Windows and Softimage are registered trademarks and Windows
                  NT is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

                  Silicon Graphics and SGI are registered trademarks and
                  Indigo Extreme is a trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc.

                  Intergraph is a registered trademark and TDZ is a trademark
                  of Intergraph Corporation.

                  Lightwave is a registered trademark of NewTek, Inc.

                  SPEC is a registered trademark of System Performance
                  Evaluation Corporation.

                  StrongARM is a trademark of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd.

                  Intel is a registered trademark and Pentium Pro is a
                  trademark of Intel Corporation.

CORP/97/299