imultaneously, Intel hired a number of the Digital engineers and gradually began to incorporate the company's technology into its own product lines. The StrongArm became the foundation of Intel's IXA network processor line for telecommunications equipment. The XScale chip, used in the latest Power PC handhelds and Sony's Clie, derived from StrongArm as well.
A deal between Compaq and Intel in June 2001 led to a further brain transfer. Engineers acquired from Compaq in that deal are now working on compilers forand future versions of the chip, including "Chivano." HP still sells Alpha servers but plans to phase them out by 2004.
Some, though, ended up somewhere other than Intel. Dirk Meyer, one of the chief Alpha engineers, went to AMD in 1996 and co-managed the development of the Athlon, the successful desktop chip released in 1999. Among other Alpha bits, the Athlon uses a bus originally developed for Alpha.
Hammer, the next big chip from AMD, also derives design principles from Alpha, said Brookwood, and many Alpha alumni work on the chip. One of the performance enhancements is an integrated memory controller, an idea touted years earlier on Alpha. In true Digital style, the Alpha chips that were to feature multithreading and integrated controllers have been delayed several times.
HyperTransport, which will connect Hammer chips, came from work between AMD and Alpha Processor, a defunct joint venture between Compaq and Samsung. Thirty-five engineers from API form the bulk of AMD's
Similarly, Rich Witek and Greg Hoeppner, two former Digital engineers who left the company after the Intel settlement, subsequently formed Alchemy Semiconductor. In February 2002, AMDAlchemy and made it the center of its handheld strategy.
While many of these underlying ideas came from Digital, the work to embody them in actual products has been performed by the companies touting them. Inserting hyperthreading into the Pentium 4, for instance, was an in-house job for Intel.
"Some of the actual concepts were developed there, but the implementation was done by Intel," the Intel representative said.