As a Compaq employee, I will try to give you some insight on this action. Here is an excerpt from some inside company info:
"What we have done
· Alpha license rights have been sold to Intel [You’ll remember that several years ago, Digital sold Alpha fabrication facilities to Intel and cross-licensed several patents with them. The license rights were not sold at that time.]
· Post-EV7 Alpha development work has been discontinued
· Several hundred engineers will transfer to Intel over the next few years -- including compiler experts (one of the most beneficial aspects of the deal for Intel) and the EV8 development team
Why we did it
· Margins on hardware sales continue to head toward zero; the days of giving away service and software to leverage hardware sales are gone - in fact the situation has reversed. Alpha development continued to be very costly.
· Alpha no longer enjoys the two-fold performance advantage it once held. In fact, the performance of the Intel Itanium family is projected to equal Alpha within 4 years. Even with a huge performance advantage, Alpha did not monopolize the processor market and Alpha market share would have plummeted as the performance advantage dropped.
· The Itanium processor was poised to dominate the enterprise server market - with or without the Alpha sale.
"
Also, as of right now.. the only OS that boots and runs stable on the I-64 processor is Linux. Heh heh.
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