Compaq has been busy announcing things. The first announcement is that Digital Unix will become the industry standard over the next few years because it is little endian, supported by a large enough company, and "integrated with NT". The second announcement is that Compaq will be turning to Alpha or Merced for its high end Tandem servers, away from MIPS. Is MIPS not little endian perhaps?

Compaq has apparently stated that it prefers Alpha to Merced since Alpha is half the price for more power. The same article reports that the 600 Mhz EV6 which will be appearing later this year will integrate FX32 will integrated in its "kernel". (Do they mean on the chip or in the OS?) Intel has already reacted claiming Compaq is still in the fold... but independent observers believe Compaq's trying to differentiate itself before it is relegated to "just another OEM".

Brett James sent us on article that touches on one of the thornier issues surronding the Digital-Compaq merger: what to do with Alpha. It appears now that the Alpha advertising budget may be getting chopped.

muggles writes "news from the corporate front: i received email this morning from John "Maddog" Hall stating that an Alpha server is being donated to the Debian Project by the Compaq Computer Corporation. John himself is making a personal donation of an extra 64MB of true-parity memory for the box. the server will be a development platform for the Debian Alpha distribution. much thanks and regards to both John Hall and Compaq for the support of Debian and Linux! muggles ( muggles #debian / mark@debian.org ) "

Compaq's 200 Digital engineers are busy working on two new Alpha designs: the 21364 (aka EV 7) and 21464. The 21364 is being designed for symmetric-multiprocessing boards holding up to 64 CPUs... and will a pretty enormous chip with 100 million transistors on-board. Speeds are expected to range from 750Mhz to 1.2Ghz. In the mean-time, more details of Merced have come to light: it will include a "prefetch to branch mechanism (I assume an explicit instruction: preload addresses x into the cache) and register windowing since the way predication and speculation use the registers may require more that the 128 of them Merced has. Furthermore, to optimize effectively, compilers' code generators will need a more global view of the code than the local view they currently are given, which will require significant rewrites of compiler back-ends.

Simon Rumble writes "Compaq Computer has paid $5.53 million for the altavista.com domain name. This ends a long-running dispute with the owner of Altavista Technology. This would have to be the highest price ever paid for a domain name."

Felix Finch writes "Compaq is cutting Alpha prices to take advantage of the Merced delay. Either Compaq is serious about supporting Alpha, or they are testing the waters. So Go Forth And Buy Alphas! "

Shawn T. Amundson has sent us a feature on Solaris and the Desktop. Most of his arguments are cut and paste translatable to Unix as a whole, but in Sun's case, he's quite right. If they want to grow, they need a new desktop. Anyway, hit the link below to see what he has to say about making that happen.

Leaky writes "Well some of us think the Linux market is valuable. Digital will be rolling out a Linux ready version of its low end uniprocessor Alphaserver aimed at the education market place later this month. The product is based on the Alphaserver 800 and will ship with no OS but marketed as Linux ready. Digital will begin rolling this program out to its resellers and distributors this week. Leaky ". I think this is a great start - assuming it's true. Can anyone confirm this, though? We'll keep our eyes out, but faucet.mail.dec.com isn't resolving over here (though the leaky and faucet thing does sound like a pun of sorts to me) ....

Felix Finch writes " No details, but looks like Alpha might be getting some good support here, and with IBM also supporting Apache, looks like things are shaping up for the non-Wintel crowd. "

Last night at the PC expo, Alpha Processor Inc. was launched. Its primary goal will be to drive down the cost of Alpha-based computing. Apparently Compaq will help by selling low cost servers, workstations, and perhaps even an Alpha-based notebook. Its secondary goal is to provide customizations and optimizations for specific applications, for instance to the memory subsystem. In a way, this all looks like Compaq trying to steal HP's lead in the Workstation market... but if the price of the Alpha comes down, I won't be complaining.

Eckhart Pfeiffer, CEO of Compaq had a lot to say at the PCExpo in New York this morning. But although Compaq will now be all things to all people, its aim is to migrate the Unix customers it inherited with Digital to Windows NT. Depending on how Compaq plays it, Alpha may either benefit from NT (lots of apps available first on Alpha) or lose to Merced (why buy Alpha when all the apps are on Merced?).

Compaq has surprised many by announcing that it will capitalise on its leadership position in 64 bit architectures by moving Alpha and Digital Unix into volume platforms. In particular, Compaq now wants to drive Alpha to be part of an open industry standard for 64-bit computing, with its partners Intel, Samsung and AMD. To read some analysis, hit the link below.

Larry Smith wrote in to tell us that its official. DEC is now taking the name of its new owner:Compaq. Too bad- I always thought that Digital had a better logo :)

Compaq and Samsung will announce the formation of a new company next week - Alpha Processor. The new company will market and sell Alpha chips, including the 700MHz model to be announced later this year. I still the Alpha's future is rather uncertain, but looking up, at least.

The FTC has voted to sue Intel for forcing Compaq, Digital Equipment and Intergraph to give it access to intellectual property that they did not want to share. Intel allegedly denied them early access information needed to build Intel based computers, giving their competitors an unfair advantage.

Chris Tyler has written an excellent piece examining the recent Gartner Group article we mentioned yesterday, and discussing what Linux needs to do in order to achieve Linus' vision of Total World Domination. It's an excellent piece worth your time.

This question came from the one and only Jamie Zawinski. Simply put, jwz wants to know what would make a good Unix laptop these days- let's face it, its hard. It took me a long time to make mine behave nicely under Linux (and APM and Sound is still flaky). Anyway, I've posted his full message after the link.

Alex Prestin writes "Seems the fears about compaq just ditching the alpha were unfounded " Read this link for assorted information about Compaq, and how it will continue to support the old Digital stuff (like VMS! What a great plan!)

John sent us this link where you can read about a G3/300 overpowering the Compaq box with a P2/400. The tests were just Photoshop, so that biases things somewhat, but its still pretty cool. Can't wait to try Linux out on one of those buggers. We should perform some of the same tests in the Gimp just for comparisons sake.