[Info-vax] Alpha Personal Workstation question

[Michael Kraemer]

Keith Parris schrieb:

> I recall Alpha being promoted because it had the fastest clock rate, 

which not necessarily translates into fastest machines,
but that's another story.
But yes, DEC marketing (which well existed, in contrast to
common belief here) and fanbois extolled the virtues of
its 64-bitness. But if you looked at the bottom line,
most Alpha machines didn't support more RAM than
contemporary RISC machines, so it was rather pointless.

> but 
> it seems to me there were other chips that were 64-bit at the time.

The Mips chips had it before.

>> Of course system design was limited by RAM availability and pricing,
> 
> 
> Exactly. Memory wasn't anywhere near as cheap in the early-to-mid '90s 
> as today. So to find even an 8 GB system would have been rare, and 
> excessively expensive for a single individual's engineering workstation.

The point here is not so much whether each engineer
would have needed 8GB on his desktop in 1993.
It's more of a marketing/product strategy issue.
The Alpha concept (if DEC ever had such) would have been
way more credible if DEC would also have invented memory
cheap (and fast) enough to equip each box with one or
two GB of RAM to start with, upgradable to at least four
or eight GB for a few $$ more, corresponding to the 64bit
capabilities of the CPU.
Of course this wasn't possible with contemporary
technology, but it shows once more how half-baked the
Alpha concept was.


> 64 bits applied to several things:
> - Physical address, as you mentioned
> - Virtual address (here Alpha could have way more than 4 GB)
> - Register size (allowing 64-bit arithmetic operations instead of having 
> to break them up into multiple 32-bit operations)

You bet I'm aware of all this,
but given that the Alpha wasn't the slowest chip out there,
it was destined for serious number crunching, which in
turn needs a lot of numbers in RAM to be effective.
Virtual memory isn't enough for this purpose, and even this
was limited by the time the first Alpha machines arrived:
In 1993, the first AXP servers were offered with a 2GB disk standard
(and 256MB RAM), not any different from the RISC competition.
Workstations had even less.