dividebyzero... microsoft officially dropped alpha windows support after nt4. but at microsoft there are plenty of builds of windows 2000 and win xp pro that run it. they are used for development of all 64bit products , i.e. the itanium and the hammer. The hammer in terms of ISA is not as advanced as the 10 year old alpha architecture by a long shot, because its still x86. Intel was trying to fix this. x86-64 is actually very bad ISA wise because its a kludge, but for the sake of compatibility we do stupid things like this. That probably the one good thing about apple, they are ok with painful transitions i.e. 68000 series to powerpc and osx. the p4, will still probably scale better than the hammer especially with Intel having better fabs, they can probably pull out a 3 ghz+ p4 on .13 micron SOI copper or something. possibly .09 micron by the time hammer is actually out. Now the hammer is still 64bit. big whoop de doo for most consumers, that just means they can have more than 4 gigs of ram. Do you have 4 gigs of ram? no you dont. thank you. On large servers Intel can use the 36 bit addressing extension they have been using to have 64 gigs of ram anyways. This 64 bitness will be a great marketing tool, but its not gonna suddenly make AMD a billion times better than the p4. the most significant difference is the on board memory controller not the 64bit. 64bit has been around for a decade. i.e. mips , alpha, etc (the nintendo 64 is a 64bit mips r4000 if i'm not wrong, and it certainly doesnt blow the doors off a 32bit p4 does it?). the hammer will certainly be fast. But really its not gonna change the world, destroy the p4 , etc.
As for the alpha it was not a crappy processor at all , it is one of the best CPU ISAs that have been out recently, and reached high clock speeds and had good IPC. It has a clean an modern ISA that beats the pants of of the ancient x86 ISA. if the industry had standardized on a design like alpha, CPU and compiler design would be easier now. Also, until recently alpha CPUs topped the Spec INT and Spec FP. if intel wanted to push alpha and use its superior to samsung fabs to produce it they could probably build a 2+ ghz 21264 cpu that would kill basically every CPU out there. when the alpha first came out with the 21064 generation during the pentium II days, the alpha was already at 500mhz on .35 micron technology. They just dont have the resources anymore to keep the alpha modern, but the alpha would be clocking at least at athlon xp clocks, using a modern fab such as intel or AMDs. and at 833 mhz it still beats the pants off of most CPUs out there now, since you are talking about the 833mhz 21264 which is a very powerful cpu. Not to mention half the athlon design team i believe is from digital , and those precious FPUs on your athlon xp's and opterons were basically ripped out of the alpha. Anyways your total hatred of this great CPU and AMD fanboyism just disgusts me. Intel doesnt have to play catchup with AMD. Intel's fabs are 8 months ahead of AMD for one. And secondly yamhill didnt just start, its been ongoing, and my feeling is they could probably release it whenever they wanted just to spite AMD. It was a backup plan, not something they started last month. Intel is not stupid, but being an AMD fanboy i'm sure you wont believe that. they have yamhill and the next gen itanium. Either way they have a pretty decent solution, and no one knows what yamhill is, it could simply be an x86-64'd p4, and it'd still be close enough that they wouldnt get killed. most likely its much more than that.
Alpha's are still used with linux and compaq still is selling it including the 21364 generation, but they dont have the fabs or money to push this great CPU which will probably just die into oblivion once the HP merger is done. And if you couldnt get sql server and NT to run faster on an alpha than a pII well your IT staff or you are vastly underqualified for your jobs or the alpha had like 32mb of ram, and the pII had 256. And lastly servers are not automatically going to buy the hammer just because its fast. if that were true they'd be buying athlons, and they are not. Sun ultrasparc CPUs are not that fastest out there SPEC wise, but Sun does sell an awful lot of servers. AMD has a horrible rep for reliability , their chips still have a far greater RMA rate on OEM systems than intel's do. when i worked at HP this summer, an actual flakey chip was the cause of about 10% or so of the AMD returns. I"m not saying 10% of the AMD computers were returned, but 10% of the ones that were had CPU problems, and thats still a lot considering the volume HP does. with intel it was less than 1%. the other 90 - 99% were just hard drives and modems that kind of thing. These bad AMD cpu's werent even dead, they just didnt work very well at their rated speeds. THAT on its own is a cause for concern for IT staff and probably why AMD still hasnt really broken into that market.