 threads" that run ahead of the main application to clear the computing path will likely appear, Tullsen added.
The Digital divide
The transformation of Digital into a posthumous chip powerhouse lies in the circumstances of history. Founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen, the company gained prominence in the minicomputer era and emerged as a chief rival to IBM. The PDP-11, a minicomputer released in the '70s, still garners fans to this day.
In the '80s though, the company missed both PCs and Unix because of its obsessive focus on minicomputers. Olsen didn't believe a big market existed for these lower-end products. "He was famous for saying, 'Unix was about as interesting as a Russian truck,'" recalled Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64 and a former Digital employee.
In the '90s, the company played catch-up in both markets, but was often saddled by delays and faced the problem of trying to dislodge established leaders. The company developed thechip in 1992. While touted for its performance, the chip and servers containing it never achieved the same sort of widespread acceptance in the marketplace as competing products from Sun Microsystems, HP or IBM.
"A lot of the research stuff--the sales guys couldn't sell (it) because it was ahead of its time," said Richard Belgard, a patent consultant and former engineer at competitor Data General. "Alpha was great technology, but who the hell needs another microprocessor?"
Digital also built a state-of-the-art chip fabrication facility in Hudson, Mass., that manufactured Alpha chips and StrongArms, an energy efficient chip for cell phones. That plant rarely, if ever, ran at full capacity.
Toward the end of the decade, the intellectual exodus began. In May 1997, the company filed aalleging that Intel's then-future Itanium chip violated 10 Alpha patents.
Despite the public rancor, the two companiesthe suit by October. Intel obtained the Hudson fab and the rights to make StrongArm, while Digital got $700 million. The two also entered into a 10-year cross-licensing arrangement.
Simultaneously, 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 impl