The Digital (DEC) Alpha was the benchmark minicomputer system in the 80s and early 90s. It was widely used in industry and academia, it had a choice of operating systems from Unix to Windows. It was the first 64-bit microprocessor architecture in a world which still couldn't digest 32-bit. DEC pioneered some of the leading hardware architectures of the time. PCs back then used to be 16-bit ones (these are still alive today but, you would have to look inside your car's bonnet). But Digital fell on bad times and was acquired by Compaq. Compaq being loyal Intel chum, quickly killed the famed Alpha series and broke up their chip design team. Suddenly a pool of extremely talented designers and engineers found themselves with a hard choice. Either join the Intel/Compaq axis or leave the company. Many including the famed Mr. D. Meyer left the Compaq/DEC and joined AMD (only real Intel competition). This brought about dramatic shift in AMD and the computer industry in general, culminating in the AMD Athlon processor series which we all have come to love. This brought the enterprise-scale performance technologies like the EV6 bus architecture to the mainstream PC market. The ex-DEC design team has had a hand in many other AMD success stories like DDR memory, Hypertransport, x86-64, etc. As a result, AMD products are becoming benchmarks for performance-price ratio. The x86-64 extends the familiar x86 32-bit architecture to the 64-bit arena without sacrificing performance, price or backward compatibility with older 32-bit apps.
Well, that was the flashback and returning to the present. It seems that Intel has woken up to the incredible talent of the ex-DECians. The story here says that Intel is cozying upto a lot of these ex-DEC employees. What this says about Intel's own current design team (without the likes of Vinod Dham- architect of Pentium Pro, later AMD K5/K6 ) is open to debate, given the hiccups it has suffered due to RDRAM, Athlon and deadly duo of AMD-Nvidia... the future looks interesting.
Keep watching this channel for more news from chip wars. After note: The only company to still sport the Digital badge is Digital Globalsoft: the Indian software arm of the Digital group which has now acquired the Indian software operations of HP/Compaq. History often is repeated in weird ways.
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Update: December 2, 2003 Luck for the last bit of Digital name has run out. Digital Globalsoft India is being merged with its parent HP and in all probability loose its Digital identity for ever.