[Info-vax] Message from HP.

[Michael Kraemer]

mcleanjoh at gmail.com schrieb:
> Let's look at a few things from Digital's and HP's perspective. 
> The Alpha chip was selling for around $1700

that would have been a cheap one.
It was rather $2000 to $3000,
http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/dec_collapse.shtml
(fifth paragraph)

> and was hoped to set the
> world on fire but apart from a Japanese manufacturer (Fujitsu?)

They were (and still are) on Sparc.

> no-one else used it. 

almost. And that was one of Alpha's biggest problems.

> That left Digital carrying the can on all costs
> - staff, manufacturing plant and raw materials - and the volume of
> Alpha sales, even if they were to loyal Digital customers, just
> didn't produce the profit to keep Alpha viable. 

Just a rough estimate: Alpha development plus the fab costed
around $500M/a, and with only 100000 chips sold per year,
each Alpha CPU should have been priced at $5000 just to recover
the development cost. So they must have made a loss on each
Alpha they sold on the free market.
Even fabless, at Compaq times, they had to spend $300M/a.

> We could argue for
> weeks (and some still might) about the lack of advertising for VMS
> and how an increased customer base might have created the critical
> mass for both VMS-related Alpha sales and sales for wider use of
> Alpha (Windows?), but that advertising didn't happen and what's past
> is past.

You forget that DEC Unix outsold VMS on Alpha by roughly 2:1,
and Windoof in whatever flavour was entirely negligible,
http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/compaq_epoch.html
(third paragraph)

> But don't think for a moment that HP will be fine and dandy if VMS
> disappears.  The Integrity chip was supposed to be a new industry
> benchmark and maybe it was for a while, that "while" being just until
> other 64-bit chips appeared. 

What other "64bit" chips to wait for?
Towards the end of the 1990s all major RISC chips
and their associated software platforms had 64bit.
That was years before x86 and also before Itanic's
first silicon.

> If you were HP's competition would you
> prefer to buy a chip from HP (and help your competitor) or would you
> prefer to buy from a vendor-neutral company like Intel?  To me that's
> a no-brainer, and it spells the end for Integrity.

What has HP to do with it?
Intel is the only source for Itanic CPUs,
and HP is just a customer. OK, it's the only one,
so intel maybe would welcome another one.
(I guess that Itanic is about the only architecture
where you don't look for a "second source"
but rather a "second customer" :-).