Intel Investors - All is not Well in Alpha Land - Compaq loses a key Designer
The Alpha design team lost a key designer/manager recently when Dan Dobberpuhl resigned.
Maybe Compaq won't have a slam dunk Alpha program after all !
Paul
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techweb.com
Compaq Loses Key Alpha
Designer
(08/12/98; 9:53 a.m. ET)
By Rick Boyd-Merritt, EE Times
As it prepares its bid to make the Alpha
microprocessor architecture an industry
standard for 64-bit computing, Compaq has lost
one of the seminal engineers behind the Alpha
program. Dan Dobberpuhl, an early architect of
Alpha, left the company last Friday to join an
unnamed start-up.
Dobberpuhl was the director of Compaq's Palo
Alto Design Center, where the next-generation
Alpha processor, dubbed the EV-7, is being
designed. He was a founder of that center for
Maynard, Mass.-based Digital Equipment, the
originator of the Alpha architecture.
Sources inside and outside Compaq's Alpha
design team praised Dobberpuhl as a talented
engineer, but none were willing to guess the
impact his departure might have on Alpha in its
race for high-end computing performance with
Intel's Merced.
"It's not like the end of the world for us," said one
engineer in the group. "Still, it's impossible to
know if it will slow the EV-7 program down."
"He was definitely one of the founding fathers of
the Alpha program and prior VAX
microprocessors at Digital," said David
Patterson, a professor of computer science at
the University of California, in Berkeley, who is
familiar with Dobberpuhl's work. "I think he's an
extraordinarily talented guy who is going to be a
big help to any start-up. But it's not clear that the
program they have running at [Compaq] would
be derailed now that he has left, unless lots of
other senior designers left, as well."
Not A Bad Turn-Over
ccording to the engineer in the Alpha program,
less than half a dozen engineers have left the
group since Houston-based Compaq ( company
profile) acquired it. He speculated that
Dobberpuhl may have left the company to
recapture some of the excitement of leading a
project such as StrongARM.
The Palo Alto group was originally set up to
explore a low-power version of Alpha, but
decided to build a chip based on an ARM core
instead. The resulting StrongARM won kudos for
its million-instructions-per-second-per-watt
ratings and is now part of Intel's product portfolio,
following a deal in which Digital sold most of its
semiconductor operations -- apart from the
Alpha -- to Intel.
"In my view, most of the people who have left
[Digital's semiconductor group] did so because
they liked the StrongARM experience," said the
Alpha engineer. "It was something really
world-class. Alpha is large, and no one person
can get their head around it, but would only be
responsible for some chunk of Alpha that itself
might be bigger than StrongARM."
Compaq has already named a new head of the
Palo Alto Design Center. But the company
refused to identify that person or to comment on
Dobberpuhl's departure.
The defection comes at a time when Compaq is
trying to pull together a broader alliance behind
Alpha. Earlier this year, the Federal Trade
Commission ruled it would let Digital sell its
semiconductor operations to Santa Clara,
Calif.-based Intel only if Digital could secure new
second-source licensees of the Alpha
architecture, which competes with the high-end
X86.
Advanced Micro Devices was at that time in
discussions to license Alpha, in part because
AMD will use the EV-7 processor bus on its
upcoming high-end X86 processors. However,
an AMD spokesman said the company has no
plans to make Alpha parts unless a broader
market emerges for the chip.
"There's a strong push in Compaq to find
partners that would use Alpha technology," said
Compaq's chief technology officer, Bill Strecker,
in an interview in June. "That's something I'm
very much engaged in."
However, Samsung has to date expanded its
work on Alpha by launching a U.S. sales and
marketing unit to promote the processor. A
separate partner, Mitsubishi, has discontinued
any work with the architecture. |
