Posted 25/04/2000 10:06am by Mike Magee
Microsoft kicks Compaq's Alpha in teeth
Microsoft is advising corporate IT buyers that choosing the Alpha microprocessor as
a future platform is a risky business.
But, at the same time, some elements of Microsoft also appear to be blissfully
unaware that Compaq kicked it in the teeth last year when it said that it would no
longer support NT or Windows 2000 on the fast Alpha microprocessor.
At a Microsoft Web page for IT managers considering which microprocessor should
be adopted to support Windows 2000, the firm, quoting a book by Sean Deuby about
Windows 2000 server, says that the MIPs platform and the PowerPC platform were
the victim of market forces.
The document claims that only leaves x86 chips and Alpha chips as platforms for NT
and its variants. It advises: "The commercial point to consider when choosing a server
architecture is Alpha's uncertain future. Since the merger of Compaq and Digital,
strategic support of the Alpha hasn't been a sure thing by any means. Compaq has
begun marketing Alpha machines under the Compaq brand, but a small market share
translates into a smaller number of software vendors with applications that are
Alpha-compatible and, more importantly, peripherals that have Alpha drivers beyond
what's in the base OS media distributed by Microsoft."
Last year, as exclusively revealed here, Compaq took the decision to dump both NT
and Win64 for the Alpha platform, but the jury is still out as to the degree of the firm's
commitment to the alternative microprocessor, given the conflicting messages it has
expressed to the world.
There does, indeed, appear to be something of a continuing tussle within Compaq
over the Alpha platform, despite the fact that its Wildfire clustering platform is out next
month.
According to a recent edition of Shannon knows Compaq, the firm has failed to clock
as high as was anticipated. Editor Terry Shannon said: "During a 12-month period
that saw Alpha clock speeds increase by approximately 100 MHz, IA-32 speeds
increased by around 400 MHz, or four times as much as Alpha."
Shannon also points out that higher Alpha processor speeds from API, which were to
have appeared by now, have still failed to make an appearance. Samsung, he claims,
is concentrating on bringing CMOS 8-based EV68 Alpha parts to market, and that
these will become available at 833MHz initially. Systems won't be available until much
later this year.
And 1GHz IBM Alphas using copper interconnects will not see the light of day until the
middle of 2001, according to Shannon.
We reported that until late last year, Microsoft was continuing to make builds of
Win2000 for the Alpha platform internally, possibly as an in-house exercise. So we
can't help feeling that the Microsoft document, which you can find here is not as out of
date as you might think, but could represent some bitterness in Redmond at
Compaq's decision to stick with flavours of Unix and OpenVMS for the poor old Alpha.
© |
