<story><title>How much better was DEC Alpha than contemporary x86?</title><url>https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/13611/how-much-better-was-dec-alpha-than-contemporary-x86</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>indymike</author><text>At the time that Alpha came out, the x86 was struggling to get more clock speed, and the groupthink was that RISC was the way forward. RISC chips would run at 4-8x the clock speed of an x86 and even when you adjusted for needing 2-3x more instructions, RISC was 50-200% faster.&lt;p&gt;DEC had a winner with Alpha. It had speed, and most importantly, you could run Windows NT on it. NT mattered because most Unix vendors at the time wanted $1,000&amp;#x2F;CPU for their licenses, and NT was $cheap (the OEM version was around $300 if I recall correctly).&lt;p&gt;As other posters have said, DEC just could not get out of their own way and let Alpha succeed. Wierd sales policies, hostile partnerships, and intense competition all really stymied DEC. A lot of the weirdness came from trying to protect their legacy base of VAX and PDP midrange systems and a general hatred of IBM (who was pushing OS&amp;#x2F;2).&lt;p&gt;BTW as I recall, Windows NT supported x86, Alpha and MIPS (another RISC vendor) with the first commercially available version of NT. MS added a few other RISC architectures in the following years (ARM most notably). x86 closed the speed gap a few years later with the Pentium II (the Pentium Pro was largely used in servers) and the rest is history.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Fnoord</author><text>Windows NT also ran on PowerPC and Itanium [1].&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Windows_NT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Windows_NT&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>How much better was DEC Alpha than contemporary x86?</title><url>https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/13611/how-much-better-was-dec-alpha-than-contemporary-x86</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>indymike</author><text>At the time that Alpha came out, the x86 was struggling to get more clock speed, and the groupthink was that RISC was the way forward. RISC chips would run at 4-8x the clock speed of an x86 and even when you adjusted for needing 2-3x more instructions, RISC was 50-200% faster.&lt;p&gt;DEC had a winner with Alpha. It had speed, and most importantly, you could run Windows NT on it. NT mattered because most Unix vendors at the time wanted $1,000&amp;#x2F;CPU for their licenses, and NT was $cheap (the OEM version was around $300 if I recall correctly).&lt;p&gt;As other posters have said, DEC just could not get out of their own way and let Alpha succeed. Wierd sales policies, hostile partnerships, and intense competition all really stymied DEC. A lot of the weirdness came from trying to protect their legacy base of VAX and PDP midrange systems and a general hatred of IBM (who was pushing OS&amp;#x2F;2).&lt;p&gt;BTW as I recall, Windows NT supported x86, Alpha and MIPS (another RISC vendor) with the first commercially available version of NT. MS added a few other RISC architectures in the following years (ARM most notably). x86 closed the speed gap a few years later with the Pentium II (the Pentium Pro was largely used in servers) and the rest is history.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxerickson</author><text>In ~2000 I knew someone using NT on an Alpha. It wasn&amp;#x27;t a better experience than my 2 year old P2, and they had paid more for it.</text></comment>