[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[Michael Kraemer]

In article <iusece$760$1 at Iltempo.Update.UU.SE>, Johnny Billquist
<bqt at softjar.se> writes:
> 
> Well, the Alpha was not really a latecomer. 

It was.
The first Alpha computers you could buy as late as early 1993.
The first Power's arrived in 1990, the first HP "Snakes"
in 1991, iirc, just to name a few competitors,
not to mention Sun and SGI who had their stuff out much earlier.
These few years made the difference between live or die.

> It's also about 20 years old 
> now.

hindsight doesn't matter in this case,
the early years made the difference.
 
> And it was the first high speed CPU out there, 

it probably was the highest clocked CPU,
but this doesn't necessarily translate into
the fastest computers.
If you look at DEC's initial lineup (3000 AXP)
they had to clock it up to 200 MHz just to marginally
beat an HP 755 (@99Mhz) or an IBM 580 (@60MHz).
http://tinyurl.com/64j4go8
And we did not have discussed price yet.
Not very impressive IMHO for an architecture already three years late.
 
> as well as the first 
> clean 64 bit CPU. 

That was the Mips R4000.
And given the RAM constraints of that time,
64bit addressing was almost useless.


> It had a lot going for it. However, it was tied to a 
> company that was sinking, which is a part of what made it fail.

Alpha was just too heavy for relatively small company like DEC.