Apple and Alpha

All the talk about Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips had be thinking one of the worlds greatest CPU’s was the Alpha. This chip was created by DEC and landed in Intel’s hands. And while Intel still produces it, I don’t think anyone uses it. It still contains revolutionary technology. The hyper threading in the Pentium 4 is a derived from the Alpha. But the amazing thing is that that the Alpha is micro encoded, and can emulate ANY instruction set. At DEC it was developed to emulate the aging VAX CPU. And guess what, it could emulate the PPC instruction set of the PowerPC, without requiring a PowerPC template or a license. Interesting thought, looking forward to Monday’s announcement.