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And as for the hardware miracles of the Alpha architecture, you can find some of its magic in AMD's Opteron processors. They inherited much of the insanely fast bus architecture and 64-bit goodness of the Alpha.
>>>>
I think HP might have made a mistake staking the future of VMS on the ITANIUM instead of Opteron...
From what I've been able to gather, the Itanic architecture places all the performance work on the compiler, and so far it has proven extremely difficult to create compilers that generate the speed.
Mass-market forces continue to propel the humble lil' 8088 architecture and its offspring far beyond what their technical capabilities would ever have predicted. :-) Nearly every other CPU architecture is better; none have been able to beat it in the marketplace.