[Info-vax] Sunway TaihuLight is the fastest supercomputer in the world

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Wednesday, 22 June 2016 22:17:48 UTC+1, lawren... at gmail.com  wrote:
> On Thursday, June 23, 2016 at 12:14:49 AM UTC+12, johnwa... at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> > DEC did let others make Alpha. At least Samsung and Mitsubishi had
> > the kind of Alpha licences that let them design and make their own
> > Alpha chips. Samsung used theirs to design chips and boards of
> > their own, not just clones, which carried the AlphaPowered logo,
> > before times changed and suddenly Alpha wasn't a promising place
> > to be any more.
> 
> Why did that happen? Was Alpha too expensive? Did DEC’s lawsuit against Intel scare the customers away?


There was indeed a lawsuit, a public settlement, and some
backroom deals.

At the time, DEC HQ were persuaded that Intel (either with
x86 or IA64) were more important to DEC than Alpha would be.
Not least because Intel had huge piles of cash and therefore
anything they did would be successful. DEC, on the other hand,
wasn't flush for cash.

The overall cost of devloping a chip (and any associated
manufacturing facilities) is largely independent of the volume
sold.

If there's no cash pile to support development, the next
likely source of money is the chip's customers. This led to
what was called the "Alpha tax"; regardless of the actual chip
manufacturing costs,someone's still got to pay for development.

Intel, in contrast, had both a huge cash pile and an ongoing
high-margin high end chip business (Xeon etc).

Volume's a part of that picture too. But not the only important
part. Another part was that DEC HQ appeared to think that they
could either be Intel's best friend (without Alpha), or they
could go their own way (with Alpha).

This was at a time when some people in DEC HQ still thought
there was useful profit to be made from designing and building
robust well engineered x86 PCs for the business market.
Ignoring what would turn out to be a high volume low margin
barely profitable business was not thought to be an option. Oh
well.

For a while, DEC's later low end Alpha designs shared a great
deal of hardware with the equivalent x86 DEC US PCs. For example,
the Personal Workstation series had Alpha members as well as 
x86 members, all based around NLX form factor motherboards with
processor-specific daughter cards. The Alphastation 400 had
tried the same common box+motherboard, different daughtercard,
principle previously.

They did OK in some specific markets in some specific geographies,
where they were targeted at markets where they had advantages.
But against a commodity x86 NT PC from Gateway2000 etc they stood
little chance.

But the backroom deal associated with the court settlement ensured
that regardless of the technology, Alpha had no real future because
IA64 was going to take over the world of "industry standard 64bit".

And in due course that's where AMD64 came in (as mentioned by IanD
and did what Intel had been saying was impossible - a 64bit
x86-compatible chip family. And the rest is history.