Commoditization of 4-way

"Stephen Sprunk" wrote in message
s.com...
....

Making innovation _profitable_ is arguably more
important than bringing it to market first and then going under, because
the
former leads to permanent change and the latter is just fodder for
comp.arch.

1. Alpha was profitable, and could have been far more so. The consequences
of the fact that Compaq (and DEC before it, post-Olsen) chose to concentrate
on its failing PC business rather than on its profitable high-end products
have little relevance to this discussion.

2. Given the somewhat incestuous relationship between Alpha and AMD over a
significant period of time (e.g., high-level people and the EV6 bus), it is
not unreasonable to suggest that EV7's memory and glueless MP architecture
at least inspired and to some degree may have informed AMD's.

- bill