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The DEC syndrome

DEC was notorious for its FAT CISC processors that was
slowly imroving over lengty spans of time. Then it downed
on them that CISCs are dead (which is right) and they
embarked in the race of a high clock rate (for the times)
superscalar RISC that would do almost everything in the
opposite fashion than their VAX CISCs.

They didn't provide a good enough transition phase. (They
did provide much better environment for their VAX
customers to swich over to the Alpha processor than what
Intel has offered so far for the transition into the IA64.)
Nevertheless, there was a missing processor link missing
from the VAX to the Alpha. DEC put all of its eggs in the
Alpha busket but the market didn't like to upgrade quickly
enough to salvage DEC financially.

Although Alpha was a landmark processor for its time (and
still is a point of reference for RISC designs) the effort
flopped because the cultural shock from CISC to RISC is
intense. Non R/D organizations prefer evolution, stability
and smooth transitions than exotic designs and revolution.

We see very similar situation now with intel. Ofcourse Intel
has other eggs in other buskets but it has reached a
watershed point where it will have to make a choice among
several risky paths.

One thing is for sure: after a few years 32 bits will be
present only at home. Everyone will 'need' 64-bit
processor. Since Itanium is SOOOO SLOOOOWLY moving its
butt and AMD is already ahad in 64 bit x86, I see it as a
natural nest step to see a proliferation of AMD 64 bits
processors on the desktop. Actually this is a ver decent
EVOLUTIONARY step for the business computing
environments. This combined with the fact that AMD and
other heavy weights tech comanies have proposed a very
decent interprocessor connection architecture
(hypertransport) will make low end SMPs readily available to
the masses. The next step is large scalable SMPs.

Nevertheless, things started getting interesting again, like
in the CISC to RISC times....

-m

Posted by: michael-t   Posted on: 02/10/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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