[Info-vax] Vaxes shutting off this week

[Neil Rieck]

On Mar 2, 9:34 pm, "Tom Linden" <t... at kednos.company> wrote:
> On Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:40:21 -0800, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de>  
> wrote:
>
[...snip...]
>
> I agree, Mips was in my view a better design, and Digital had after all
> invested in the venture.  But as I have said before, abandoning the
> VAX was the seminal event that led to Digital's failure.
>

I'm not so sure. VAX had to die but Alpha did not.

I was sad to see Digital switch from PDP to VAX until I worked on VAX.
While PDP was only 16-bit, addressing hardware extended the memory
range to 24-bits. VAX addressing allowed for a full 32-bits of
addressing. Initial VAX models were able to run PDP software in
hardware compatibility mode( for almost 10 years), so most software
guys were happy. DEC still built their own peripherals which mean
these machines were too expensive for most companies.

I was sad to see Digital switch from VAX go to Alpha until I worked on
Alpha. While VAX was only 32-bit, addressing hardware extended the
memory range to 40-bits (and maybe even higher?). Alpha addressing
allowed for 64-bits of addressing. The Alpha CPU added other important
features including IEEE floating point. Except for the CPU, Alpha was
mostly built from COTS (commercial off the shelf) parts which means
the purchase price dropped while performance went through the roof
(mostly due to the switch from CISC to RISC) but faster memory an
buses also helped. Many Alphas only required single-phase power and no
special cooling.

I never saw any reason for Compaq/HP killing Alpha and can only assume
that new management thought they were repeating the transitions of the
past. Intel fell into this trap too, and I am convinced that they will
kill Itanium. This is especially true since Pentiums went from 32-bit
to 64-bit compatible with most people not even noticing the
changeover, as well as their Core2 technology going from single core
to dual, then quad, and now hex while Itanium is still stuck at dual
core. Itanium will soon be irrelevant.

p.s. please see my recent OT post about GPUs. Many managers at Intel
believe their "silicon business" is under attack by customer attention
shifting from CPUs to GPUs (CPUs will never become obsolete, but GPUs
provide a better vector co-processor solution than shoving SIMD
instructions into the CPU). AMD avoided this paradigm shift by
purchasing ATI. I assumed that Intel would counter by purchasing
Nvidia but, instead, they are developing their own technology called
Larrabee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(GPU)
It is during this distraction that someone at Intel will decide to
kill off Itanium.

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/