News & announcements

August 1998

28 August, 1998

» Compaq confirms Alpha workstation delay

» Compaq delays Alpha stations

"Compaq has put off the release of its first Alpha-processor-based workstations until the fourth quarter, and may push it back further, to clear up performance issues with the system."

[The delay appears to only affect the XP workstation; Prolinea servers are still on schedule.]

 

» Compaq Storage Offerings Protect Customers from Disaster (Press release)

» Looking At Disaster In The Mirror

"Compaq last week began shipping hardware and software to help data administrators set up systems for both disaster recovery and tolerance.

The disaster recovery products are designed to be used with remote backup, remote vaulting and remote JBOD (just a bunch of disks), a group of hard disks that are not set up in any RAID configuration. The products combine two SCSI extenders, the HSZ80 StorageWorks Ultra SCSI RAID controller and associated software. Quarter-speed Fibre Channel support enables data to be pumped to backup repositories up to 15 kilometers away from headquarters.

For now, the products support only Digital Unix and OpenVMS operating systems. Support for NT, Alpha and other platforms will be offered later this year."

 

A Little Self-Control

"Raritan Computer Inc. last week introduced its MasterConsole MX4 switch, designed to control up to 256 computers from any one of up to four sets of keyboards, monitors and mice."

 

Prefetching helps cores combat cache delays -- Hot Chips attacks bandwidth barrier

"A growing struggle for bandwidth ran through the papers at the 10th annual IEEE Computer Society Hot Chips Conference here last week. Superscalar CPUs became more so, SIMD media-processing extensions proliferated and clock rates rose. But key papers betrayed a rising tension between the appetites of processing cores and the advance in cache speeds."

 

Memory bottleneck targeted -- Industry Works On Speeding Up Transfer Rates

"Improved memory interfaces are on the horizon but will not reach shore for another 18 to 24 months. The arrival will provide resellers of PCs, servers and workstations with new revenue opportunities, but it also will mean that they have to carry more inventory and provide more customer support.

The need for improved memory interfaces stems from rapid, ongoing improvements in microprocessors. "While microprocessor performance has increased 200 times during the past 10 years, memory speeds have only grown by a factor of 20," said Gregg Bouchard, programming engineer at Compaq Computer Corp.'s Alpha Development Group in Shrewsbury, Mass."

 

DOJ probes Microsoft-Intel ties

[From the ancient history files, archeologists at Intel just now uncovered this antiquity from 1995.]

"Gates didn't want [the Intel Architecture Labs'] 750 engineers interfering with his plans for domination of the PC industry," the Intel memo stated. "Gates made vague threats about support for other platforms, and on the same day he announced a major program to support the Alpha microprocessor made by Digital Equipment..."

 

Polywell PolyAlpha 633UX

"You can tell with just one look at the gunmetal gray case that Polywell Computers' PolyAlpha 633 isn't your average PC. And it isn't: This is a top-of-the-line workstation designed to rip the burliest application right down to size, from its blistering 633-MHz Alpha 21164 processor, out through the 4MB of cache, and right on to the SCSI hard drive system and Oxygen 3D graphics accelerator. With a massive 512MB of RAM onboard, along with a SCSI disk subsystem, it will handle massive files with ease.

Now, before you decide this is the ultimate Quake II system, think again. This machine was designed to run Windows NT or some flavor of Unix, and tackle something big."

[Gee, I know a lot of people who think this is the ultimate Quake II system...]

 

(Better late than never, this was announced in January...)

Road Runner / Alpha Workstation Teamwork Accelerates Imaging

"BitFlow, Inc. today announced and publicly demonstrated support for the company's Road Runnerä digital camera interface on workstations based on Digital Equipment Corporation's Alphaä microprocessor. The new combination offers the the industry's highest-performance open-systems way to acquire and process images from industrial and scientific digital cameras.

The new Alpha workstation support makes the Road Runner more useful by bringing more computing resources to bear upon the image processing problem. Their pixel processing rates and main memory bandwidths are multiples of those offered by the Intel Pentium family.

In addition, the PCI bridge chip set built into Alpha workstations never stalls the PCI bus. In contrast, Intel's popular 440FX chipset blocks peripherals' access to main memory from time to time, unpredictably limiting PCI bus throughput."

Designing 64-bit-Compatible Interfaces

"Porting from the 32-bit Windows platform to the 64-bit Windows platform should not, by itself, create any problems for distributed applications, whether they use Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) directly or through DCOM. The RPC programming model specifies well-defined data sizes and integral types that are the same size on each end of the connection. Also, in the LLP64 abstract data model developed for 64-bit Windows, only the pointers expand to 64 bits and all other integral data types remain 32 bits. Because pointers are local to each side of the client/server connection and are usually transmitted as null or non-null markers, the marshaling engine can handle different pointer sizes on either end of a connection transparently."

 

Alpha 21264 stakes off the claim - long before Merced

"Intel might be facing a year 2000 problem: public embarrassment. Digital is boldly claiming that its Alpha 21264 processor will run twice as fast as Merced, which will be the first chip based on the new IA-64 architecture from Intel and Hewlett-Packard (HP). "

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21 August, 1998

Compaq loses key Alpha designer

"As it prepares its bid to make the Alpha microprocessor architecture an industry standard for 64-bit computing, Compaq Computer Corp. has lost one of the seminal engineers behind the Alpha program. Dan Dobberpuhl, an early architects of Alpha, left the company last Fridayto join an unnamed startup.

Dobberpuhl was the director of Compaq's Palo Alto Design Center, where the next-generation Alpha processor, dubbed the EV-7, is being designed. He was a founder of that center for Digital Equipment Corp., the originator of the Alpha architecture."

Alpha Vendors On The Ropes

"It’s crisis time for alpha hardware makers. When Compaq Computer Corp. acquired Digital Equipment Corp. and its Alpha hardware business earlier this year, RISC processor fans were hopeful the chip would receive a much-needed shot in the arm. Instead, Alpha is taking several very serious blows to the chin.

Sm@rt Reseller has learned that Compaq has cut off co-op marketing funds for Alpha, which means that many Alpha workstation and server vendors no longer can afford to advertise their wares. Further complicating matters, demand for Alpha-based NT workstations is drying up, because of increasingly popular Pentium II workstations from Dell Computer Corp., IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and—ironically—Compaq."

Compaq kicks Intel's Merced butt while it’s down

"In a move which will send shock waves through the industry, Compaq said yesterday that it prefers the 64-bit Alpha processor to Merced as it offers better performance and is 50 per cent cheaper.

Richard George, who runs the Alpha business in the UK, said: "The Alpha chip is better than the Merced chip. It has more applications than the IA64." "

Intel fights back after Compaq attack

Some might think that this sounds more like an endorsement for Alpha than 'striking back'...

"Intel has struck back at Compaq’s unprecedented attack on the Merced processor by insisting that the PC vendor is still committed to the platform.

“We’re talking about a product which has still 18 months to go before it is released and we [Intel] don’t speculate on its performance. If we’re not in a position to speculate about its performance, neither is Compaq.”

He said that Compaq executive Richard George, who yesterday claimed Alpha was a better processor than the Merced and had more software for the platform, was being unfair in that comparison.

“You’d expect Alpha to have more software ported than Merced,” he said. “The Alpha chip has been around for five years.” "

Mips chip flip flops as Tandem team chooses Alpha

"The Compaq-Tandem-Digital triumvirate said officially today that its Himalaya servers will stop using Mips chips in 2001.

David Russell, Compaq’s Himalayan spokesman, said: "We’ll continue with two new iterations of Mips chips. There are two candidates being looked at, Alpha and Merced. We’ll consider performance, price/performance and time to market." "

SCO ducks as Compaq lets fly

"Compaq has said that Digital Unix will become the industry standard Unix over the next few years.

At a press briefing held at Digital’s former offices in central London, Compaq said that Sequent and Tandem will take Digital Unix (D/UX) and persuade other vendors to adopt it too.

Richard George, in charge of Compaq’s Alpha processor in the UK, said: "We’ll achieve 22 per cent of the Unix market share by the year 2002." "

 

DECtalk Software, Version 4.4 for Windows NT and Windows 95

"DECtalk Software gives software developers the tools and products that allow them to incorporate into their applications DECtalk modules that convert standard ASCII text in American English into highly intelligible and natural-sounding speech that is playable through audio hardware on DIGITAL's AlphaSystems and Intel Personal Computers. Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish versions of the software are also available today, and a German language version is under development."

This package has been around for a while, and in this update offers some new features, but what I found most interesting was the list of supported platforms: as this writer frequently advocates, Alpha NT was listed first, before any x86 systems! Thanks, Bernie!

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14 August, 1998

Alpha Users Want Equal Treatment from Microsoft

"In an open letter to Microsoft released last week, members of the AlphaNT mailing list asked the company to fulfill its promises for platform-independent development."

 

Key Alpha architect leaves Compaq

"As it prepares its bid to make the Alpha microprocessor architecture an industry standard for 64-bit computing, Compaq Computer Corp. has lost one of the seminal engineers behind the Alpha program. Dan Dobberpuhl, an early architect of Alpha, left the company last Fridayto join an unnamed startup."

 

Compaq, IBM strike Java deals

"Compaq Computer Corp. on Monday will announce a three-year OEM agreement with Novera Software Inc.

Novera's jBusiness applications will be bundled and supported on Compaq's Alpha- and Windows NT-based servers and used to develop Unix/NT integration software, said Novera Vice President David Butler. Novera's products include a Java application server, management server and component development environment."

 

Symantec Announces Norton AntiVirus 5.0 for Windows NT Server

"Symantec Corporation (Nasdaq: SYMC), the world leader in utility software for business and personal computing, today announced Norton AntiVirus (NAV) 5.0 for Windows NT Server, the latest version of the industry's leading automatic, comprehensive virus protection for Windows NT Server.

 

Norton AntiVirus 5.0 for Windows NT Server requires an Intel or DEC Alpha system running Windows NT Server or Workstation 4.0..."

 

Corrections, (EE Times)

Sometimes the truth appears in a sidebar buried deep on page xyzzy... "An article in the Aug. 3rd issue should have stated that Intel Corp. acquired the rights to manufacture the Alpha microprocessor, not the Alpha design itself, from Digital Equipment Corp."

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7 August, 1998

Intel, Compaq gird for 64-bit battle

"A battle is heating up at the bleeding edge of microprocessor technology as Intel Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp.'s Alpha group rush to ready their competing 64-bit architectures. New technical details have come to light about the race, which pits Intel's Merced, due out in mid-2000, against the next-generation Alpha CPU, known as the 21364."

 

» Is Merced doomed?

» Is Merced Marketable?

"Touted as a major milestone for Intel and the computer industry in general, Merced, the company's first 64-bit chip, appears to be losing its luster because of delays, performance issues, and upstaging by other processor manufacturers."

"In addition, competing Alpha chips from Digital Equipment Corp., now part of Compaq Computer Corp., are expected to run even faster - at 1,000 MHz, or 1 gigahertz."

"Compaq is sinking considerable resources into Alpha and touting it as a highly viable 64-bit technology--especially because it is already on the market."

 

Alpha: Who wants it?

Another article from Lisa DiCarlo? Yup. But fear not. Despite the ominous title (which takes on a much more faithful-to-the-story title in the ZDnet version), this story is rather positive for Alpha. Check out her quotes:

"Now, Intel is still searching for a way to meet provisions for a processor that presents perhaps the biggest challenge to its Pentium products...

The politics of Alpha notwithstanding, Compaq will apply its own economies of scale to workstations based on the chip...

The upshot for Alpha customers, regardless of who assumes manufacturing, is likely to be positive."

 

Channel Reassurances -- Digital VARs To Compaq: 'You Must Treat Us Right'

"Houston-Compaq Computer Corp. is reassuring high-end Digital Equipment Co. VARs they have a safe future with Compaq. But some Digital resellers are worried because Compaq hasn't shared its high-end plans with them, and because the company has been getting most of its high-end channel advice from distributors competing with high-end VARs."

"They are concerned about investing valuable up-front time designing a custom, Alpha-based system for a customer, only to have a Compaq PC VAR take the business by selling the high-end hardware at the same 4 to 5 percent profit margin they get on PCs."

 

Analysts skeptical of Sun's claims for future chip

Now it's Sun's turn to compare tomorrow's UltraSPARC against low-end Alpha systems.

 

TNT's The Hunley docks at Station X Studios, 7-30-98

From our Alpha-faithful friends in Santa Monica comes a new made-for-TV movie.

"Station X Studios which opened its doors in Santa Monica in 1997, specializes in photo-real 3D/digital animation and visual effects utilizing a state-of-the-art supercomputers powered by Compaq Computer Alpha CPU’s running Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system."

Sometimes, concentrating on your technology decisions up front makes the business deals down the road easier to acheive.

 

Optimizing Alpha Executables on Windows NT with Spike

No, it's not exactly news, but it's fascinating reading for those who want the details of Spike.

"Many Windows NT–based applications are large, call-intensive programs, with loops that span multiple procedures and procedures that have complex control flow and contain numerous basic blocks. Spike is a profile-directed optimization system for Alpha executables that is designed to improve the performance of these applications. The Spike Optimizer performs code layout to improve instruction cache behavior and hot-cold optimization to reduce the number of instructions executed on the frequent paths through the program. The Spike Optimization Environment provides a complete system for performing profile feedback by handling the tasks of collecting, managing, and applying profile information. Spike speeds up program execution by as much as 33 percent and is being used to optimize applications developed by DIGITAL and other software vendors."

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