The rumour mill has suddenly started working overtime with speculation about the fabled Alpha, Digital Equipment Corp’s upcoming 64-bit RISC effort, which due to turn up in products starting next year. Either enough nonsense has already been spouted or DEC merely wants to catch a favourable public relations tide – take your pick of motives – but it’s now scrambling to put together an Alpha round table on Monday 25 in Nashua, New Hampshire. One insider promised that the media event would be devoid of marketing hype (his words) and focus instead on in-depth discussions with Alpha’s hardware and software designers, architects and engineers. DEC will then follow this shindig with the December 3 San Francisco debut, attended by some 800 people, of a string of new MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC-based workstations and servers including the $4,000to-$6,000 Advanced Computing Environment unit, baby Maxine, destined to compete against high-end personal computers. DEC’s battering in the minicomputer market has forced it to reverse strategic direction. Where once it was determined to keep VMS and Unix strictly segregated on VAX and MIPS RISC machines respectively, such is no longer the case. The company has now partitioned the market into three: low-end Advanced Computing Environment-OSF/1 machines designated price leaders; higher-end Alpha-OSF/1 boxes built for their performance characteristics; and Alpha/VMS computers, which will overlap with DEC’s traditional VAX machines, for enterprise sites. A DEC spokesman told our sister paper Unigram last week that Ultrix would definitely not run on Alpha despite reports to the contrary. DEC regards Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Open Desktop as OSF/1, so it seems possible that operating system could appear on an Alpha box. Unfortunately, DEC would not address that question, or queries about NT on Alpha or the notion of DEC throwing Alpha and portable VMS into the Advanced Computing Environment initiative stew directly, reserving them for next week. DEC said the OSF/1 code the engineers are using is the same for both the MIPS and the Alpha boxes. The same applications (including of course all the old VMS programs) will run on both MIPS and Alpha after recompile. DEC is also building other tools to ease migration between the two systems. DEC vice-president for VAX/VMS systems and servers Bill Demmer has talked about having Alphas from desktop to data centre – and perhaps even lower than a desktop. He has also told users: Next year we will bring out performance increments of more than a factor of two [out of the latest VAX models], to be followed the year after that by another performance factor of three to four when we introduce our RISC-based technology. DEC is also expected to carry over all VAX peripherals in moving its customer base to Alpha.
