Feb 6, 2020 · The DEC Alpha, released in 1992, seems like an early implementation of a fully 64-bit microprocessor architecture. Its release led to quite a bit of both marketing hype and genuine vendor support in the mid-1990s, which supported the conclusion that Alpha would be a serious challenger to Intel x86, at least in the high-end performance and ...

Dec 7, 2020 · The main thrust of the marketing behind the DEC Alpha was its 64-bit microprocessor architecture. They got there years before potential competitors, including MIPS. At the time DEC was shipping the 64-bit Alpha, MIPS was just beginning to have success with the 32-bit MIPS R3000 being used by SGI.

Feb 25, 2020 · The first version of the DEC Alpha had no load/store instructions for 8 or 16-bit values; if you wanted to deal with data of such sizes, you had to do it by shifting and masking values in registers as necessary.

May 3, 2021 · On the Alpha, PALcode acts as a replacement for microcode (§1.1). Low-level functions that would normally be controlled by microcode are instead handled using code stored in main memory (§2.1). This consists of regular Alpha machine code augmented with five additional opcodes that provide access to normally inaccessible internal registers ...

Feb 1, 2022 · Even DEC Alpha DS10s were PCI-based but the lack of extensive graphics didn't make it a powerhouse unless it had graphics processing boards that cost 5-digit sums of money to pull off arcade levels of frame rate or rendered to a FrameStore.

Jan 22, 2021 · I could also speculate that there may have been a separate download for DEC Alpha NT4 systems. For completion sake, it is worth noting that Windows NT 4 was originally released for MIPS and PowerPC platforms, too, but Microsoft abandoned further development for these platforms before the release of SP4.

The DEC Alpha, released in 1992, seems like an early implementation of a fully 64-bit microprocessor architecture. Its release led to quite a bit of both marketing hype and genuine vendor support in ...

Jun 12, 2023 · FX!32 is a software emulator program that allows Win32 programs built for the Intel x86 instruction set to execute on DEC Alpha-based systems running Windows NT. Released in 1996, FX!32 was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to support their Alpha microprocessors.

Sep 23, 2020 · At a certain point in the 1980s, 'I' things were all the rage in DEC. BI - Backplane Interconnect (the bus in the 8xxx series VAXen - see Wikipedia) CI - Computer Interconnect (showed up as star coupler for VAXclusters, also to HSC intelligent storage controllers) NI - Network Interconnect (ethernet to you).

Dec 3, 2022 · Towards the end of the 80s, a number of threats for the PC ecosystem were emerging. The first was RISC CPUs, which provided greater performance than x86-style CPUs, and led many to consider that CISC designs like x86 were a dead end (see How much better was DEC Alpha than contemporaneous x86? for example). The second was Unix, which, despite ...