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The DEC Alpha was an architecture and line of microprocessors created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). These processors, which began shipping in the early 1990s, were among the most innovative and highest performing of their era. The 64-bit Alpha processors were the successor to DEC’s highly successful VAX product line and ran VAX legacy code, though translation, on new incarnations of the company’s VMS operating system. Alphas also ran an OSF1-derived version of Unix called Tru64, and Microsoft Windows NT ran natively on the Alphas with support for x86 programs via binary translation.
Background for Alpha
The Alpha architecture arose inside DEC in the late 1980s out of recognized challenges with the company’s then–current VAX product line. VAX design projects were facing difficulties in meeting their schedules and the designs were becoming overly complex for the relatively small DEC design teams. As a result VAX designs, which had had their...
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Emer, J., Fossum, T. (2011). DEC Alpha. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_371
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