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To: bhagavathi who wrote (104624)	6/20/2000 10:49:00 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Mula, >Check this out. Do you think Alpha's day's are numbered? 1. Your article is dated. 2. No: Compaq and Amazon.com Ink Deal for Multi-Million Dollar AlphaServer Rollout Leading Internet Retailer Expands Compaq Midrange Server Platform; Will Deploy New AlphaServer Systems for Holiday Season HOUSTON, June 19, 2000 - Delivering on its commitment to provide enterprise customers with all the tools to build, manage and grow an Internet infrastructure, Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) today announced a multi-million dollar Compaq AlphaServer sale to Amazon.com. The purchase adds to the large base of AlphaServers currently installed. Amazon currently runs all of its Web servers, and the majority of its installed base, on Compaq's midrange server platform. "As one of the most successful retailers on the Internet today, Amazon.com requires the most available, scalable and powerful servers in the marketplace. They must be able to accommodate and manage the heavy transaction load that is at the heart of their e-business," said Bill Heil, Vice President and General Manager, Business Critical Server Group. "The Compaq AlphaServer platform provides them with the most superbly engineered products to meet their demand for zero-latency and 100 percent availability." "Amazon.com chose the Compaq AlphaServer because they are the best available solution for our most demanding applications, managing explosive growth and providing the 24x7 uptime we require," said Charlie Bell, Vice President of Information Technology, Amazon.com. "AlphaServer systems are highly scalable to accommodate for growth and high traffic patterns, and provide customers with a quick response time even under heavy loads." Compaq AlphaServer GS Series on Amazon.com's Technology Roadmap "Our AlphaServer GS Series is the ideal platform for handling the high-volume transactions Amazon will experience during the holiday season," Heil said. "There is no other high-performance solution on the market that can match the availability and scalability of our industry-leading AlphaServer GS Series." According to Charlie Bell, "Amazon.com is currently deploying GS Series AlphaServers to support some of its most critical systems." About Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation, a Fortune Global 100 company, is the largest supplier of computing systems in the world. Compaq designs, develops, manufactures, and markets hardware, software, solutions, and services, including industry-leading enterprise computing solutions, fault-tolerant business-critical solutions, and communications products, commercial desktop and portable products, and consumer PCs. Compaq products and services are sold in more than 200 countries directly to businesses, through a network of authorized Compaq marketing partners, and directly to businesses and consumers through Compaq's e-commerce Web site at compaq.com. Compaq markets its products and services primarily to customers from the business, home, government, and education sectors. Customer support and information about Compaq and its products and services are available at compaq.com. Amazon was supposed to have gone over to HP, from Sun, on at least one very major purchase. Alpha is alive and well in this Wildfire, now called GS series server, which is all over Sun in price/performance. Then again, Sun doesn't need to have the top performer because of their service and Solaris, or something like that. ;-) Tony

To: bhagavathi who wrote (104624)	6/20/2000 4:49:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Mula - Re: "Check this out. Do you think Alpha's day's are numbered?" Sequent has subsequently been bought by IBM - and I believe they will be pursuing a NUMA Monterey 64 (UNIX) OS flavor. As for Alpha's days being numbered, I guess you can refer to it as a "Dead Chip Walking (or Clocking !)" Paul

To: bhagavathi who wrote (104624)	6/20/2000 6:49:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

mula - that article, and all the links, are a year and a half old. That was written before CPQ bought DEC. It's hard to believe stuff like that is still on the web... I guess the old Digital sites are not maintained very well. Sequent was bought by IBM. CPQ announced they are not porting DEC Unix - now Tru64 Unix - to IA64. My gut feel is that CPQ will continue to drive Alpha at least for another couple of generations - they are just shifting the Tandem Himilaya to Alpha, and given the requirements for stability in the Tandem customer base, that pretty much guarantees a long life. Gartner did a pretty good study on the future of Alpha a ways back which implied that CPQ would continue to drive the roadmap through the next 2 generations - I think that is EV7 and EV8. That gets them to the technology they need for the Himalaya products, which need several features not planned any time soon for IA64, and also gives them the architecture for the next generation Wildfire products. But CPQ is also a big IA64 proponent, with their current 4-way design, their joint work with Unisys on a 32 way CMP product , and the "much larger" machines that Michael Capellas discussed at the Windows2000 launch. That probably means that CPQ will do some intersection of technology between the switch-fabric Alpha designs and IA64. A common base of chipsets and substantial parts of the machine architecture, driven by the kind of volume one could expect from IA64, would reduce development costs for their Alpha and Himilaya products while also giving them competitive high end machines using an industry-standard platform. That is all speculation on my part based on bits and pieces, but it would make good business sense.