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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axp who wrote (66880)	8/23/1999 7:53:00 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 97611

axp - I'm sure they were talking about FX!32 but your statement On the high-end alphas, alpha 32-bit NT with alpha applications can run rings around the high-end x86 systems with x86 applications. is not completely accurate any more. According to people in the MSFT labs doing testing on these systems, the 8-way Xeon systems are faster than 8-way turbolasers for most applications where there is a native application for the Alpha - which is unfortunately not a great many apps. The exceptions are in areas where floating point performance is a large part of the work, such as some encoding/decoding operations. This area continued to give Alpha an edge in absolute performance but the limited market for the products, especially given the big price delta, made the systems unappealing. Yesterday CPQ's Jim Finlaw said that there is no decrease in focus on the 64 bit NT development effort on Alpha, and we know from the early results shown at MSFT's WINHEC forum that the 64 bit version showed huge performance gains, particularly on database applications, as much as a 20X improvement on some operations. I think CPQ is making a sensible and pragmatic decision here given the high costs and low return on the Alpha 32 bit NT program, and the performance of the 8-way systems. I would rather see them focus on the areas where Alpha is currently succeeding, and in helping move NT to a 64-bit, more mission-critical space. Nothing against Alpha, I think it is great technology, but CPQ can't continue to fund every program and still do the cost reductions they have committed to make. I expect to see a few more "sacred cows" go on the chopping block before too much longer.