Jack -
Alpha is way cheaper than Merced to manufacture, It is a smaller chip physically, so more chips come off of each wafer. it is simpler, so more of the chips are good. It has multiple sources. Some of the Samsung Alpha parts will compete against Celeron in price! Jeez, which would you put your money on to take the sub-1K market going forward, a 266MHZ 32 bit part with no cache for $100, or a 400MHZ 64 bit part with 1MB cache for the same $100?
The thing driving the economic viability of Alpha is volume. DEC had a hard time generating demand for more than 100,000 parts per year. CPQ could easily drive a million or more (they currently use well over 10 million processors per year).
So there is no question of selling Alpha at a loss. Also as I have outlined in other posts, Alpha is the key to putting CPQ at the head of the class with Merced, since the key is not hardware but 64 bit software, and only Alpha can do it today. |
