Hiya victor-
Posted 21/03/99 7:26am by Mike Magee
Secret Alpha system pix fall to earth
It often snows at CeBIT in Hannover but only two Alpha flakes fell on our head while we
were out there last week.
But what prize flakes they were. Two slides were passed to us, confidentially, which show
the shape of Alpha system boxes you can expect to see from Compaq later this year.
Because of their size (about 260K each), we decided to point to them rather than post them
directly. You can find the first one here and the second one here.
These slides show the AlphaServer ES40, the four way EV6 replacemen for AS4100, with
that switch that caused paroxysms at Sun a couple of weeks back.
The first slide, titled Next Generation Midrange - System Drawer, shows a schematic of the
four way boxes, including the crossbar switch. The second, called EV6 System Pedestal,
shows Compaq's upgrade strategy.
References to previous stories are at the bottom of this page.
And a reader took the trouble to tip us off about JP Morgan's thoughts on Compaq's
thoughts on Alpha and Merced.
As we have suggested here over the last year, JP Morgan too thinks Compaq is competing
with Intel on microprocessors. The beancounters at JP Morgan are of the opinion that
Compaq thinks Merced will be very greatly delayed as it waits for Win 64, meaning that
Alpha will be the only viable platform for Win64.
But if Compaq's R&D spend on the Alpha is only five per cent or so, this could cause it to
catch a cold. As Paul Otellini from Intel said to us just a few weeks back: "This is a bloody
business". ®
Some related stories
Compaq revisits Merced strategy
Compaq details Wildfire attack on Sun
Merced vs Alpha deal takes further Compaq twist
Sun doesn't have an earthly with UltraSparc III until Q2 Y2000 |
