and sales operation. This settled the existing patent-infringement issue between Digital and Intel.
The deal generated both pessimistic and optimistic comments. Pessimists
warned that it's the end of the Alpha, as Digital will now support the IA-64. Optimists believe that Digital will now have more resources to accelerate Alpha designs for multiple foundries. "This agreement meets both companies' needs," says Craig Barrett, president and chief operating officer at Intel.
According to Syed Ali, executive director of Alpha marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, "Samsung is now poised to take the lead in Alpha manufacturing, on both the price and the performance fronts." He adds that Samsung is not alone in its long-term Alpha support, noting that "Mitsubishi will also offer current and future Alpha PC processors, and AMD will use the ultrafast 21264 Alpha bus for its K7." That could make possible future chip sets and mainboards that support both the K7 and the 21264 Alpha families, according to Ali.
However, if the Alpha is to survive the Merced attack and take a significant market share away from Intel, the CPU needs to not only be priced affordably but also widen its
performance delta against future Intel products. Ali expects his company's Alpha chips to reach the 1-GHz level by the end of this year, providing performance of well over 60 SPECint95 and 90 SPECfp95. Looking at Intel's rough Merced performance road map, the 1-GHz 21264 should be faster than the initial Merced, which will appear a year or so later.
Aaron Bauch, Alpha technical marketing manager at Digital Semiconductor, says that the Intel deal enables Digital and other Alpha partners to accelerate the performance road map because they will be able to make use of new CMOS processes faster. For instance, the jump to the 0.18-micron process, which was originally slated for late 2000 or early 2001, is now due to take place in late 1999. This will enable both higher operating frequencies and better features sets.
Jesse Lipcon of Digital stated in his keynote speech at DECUS Anaheim 1997 that the schedule for 0.18-micron Alpha microprocessors has been accelerated by roughly a year (to late 1999, accor
ding to other sources). He said that this change in scheduling is a result of the recent Digital-Intel agreement.
Besides maximizing the performance of the EVxx Alpha family and enabling it to offer twice the performance of Intel chips at a similar price, Samsung is also tuning several new-generation chip sets for specific PC, workstation, or server use. According to Ali, Samsung is also using its expertise with fine processes for next-generation memories to accelerate the Alpha's move to smaller processes and greater speeds. In addition, the 64-bit version of Windows NT5.0, running on an Alpha as a 64-bit architecture, will give the Alpha a huge time-to-market edge over the Merced.
With foundries and partners gradually embarking on designing their own CPU derivatives, chip sets, and other support, the Alpha processor is now less dependent on Digital for both its technical and marketing development. Whether all this will make the Alpha a serious alternative to the IA-32 and IA-64 remains to be see
n: The ball is now in the Alpha-powered alliance court.
Alpha's Future
