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On the hardware side, DEC built very-well engineered hardware. The early Alpha machines were very well designed. Even the PC compatible lines of the era were built to a very high quality standard.
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> Even the PC compatible lines of the era were built to a very high quality standard.

DEC had a moment between 1990-92 when they did pretty good in PC market. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

'As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.'

@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and it worked, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.

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Another somewhat related error in strategy was trying to keep VAX alive for longer than it should have been, especially the ECL versions
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My understanding is that after Compaq sold the Alpha IP to intel, and quite a lot of the DNA ended up in Nehalem and Sandy Bridge.
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Not sure about that bit...

What is well known however, is that a bunch of Alpha engineers wound up at AMD, and a lot of that DNA went into the OG Athlon

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  > Intel developed QPI at its Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center (MMDC) by
  > members of what had been the Alpha Development Group, which Intel had acquired
  > from Compaq and HP and in turn originally came from Digital Equipment
  > Corporation (DEC).[8] Its development had been reported as early as 2004
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_QuickPath_Interconnect#B...

QPI was Intel's answer to the competition AMD's Athlon / HyperTransport had created

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The funny part is that arguably both HyperTransport and QPI descend from the interprocessor links designed for Alpha EV7
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IIRC, the Sunway CPUs used in Chinese supercomputers have an Alpha-like design.
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