DEC Alpha - Article Index

Encyclopedia - Dec Alpha: Encyclopedia - Dec Alpha
The DEC Alpha, also known as the Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit RISC microprocessor originally developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corp...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Dec Alpha: Encyclopedia Ii - Dec Alpha - History
Alpha was born out of an earlier RISC project named PRISM, itself the final product of several earlier projects. DEC had been marketing t...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Alpha: Encyclopedia - Alpha
Alpha may refer to: Alpha (letter), a letter in the Greek alphabet. α may be used as the symbol for: Angle of attack in aerodynamics I...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia Ii - Cray Inc. - The Cray Research Years
Seymour Cray began working in the computing field in 1950 when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Binary Translation: Encyclopedia - Binary Translation
In computing, binary translation is the emulation of one instruction set by another through translation of code. Sequences of instruction...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.
Cray Inc. is a supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. Cray Research was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cr...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - 64-bit: Encyclopedia - 64-bit
In computer architecture, 64-bit is an adjective used to describe integers, memory addresses or other data units that are at most 64 bits...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Windows Nt: Encyclopedia - Windows Nt
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. The architecture...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Windows Xp: Encyclopedia - Windows Xp
Windows XP is a major revision of the Microsoft Windows operating system created for use on desktop and business computer systems. As of ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Arm Architecture: Encyclopedia - Arm Architecture
The ARM architecture (originally the Acorn RISC Machine) is a 32-bit RISC processor architecture that is widely used in a number of appli...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Vax: Encyclopedia - Vax
VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i.e. demand...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Branch Predictor: Encyclopedia - Branch Predictor
In computer architecture, a branch predictor is the part of a processor that determines whether a conditional branch in the instruction f...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Bliss: Encyclopedia - Bliss
BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - History Of Apple Computer: Encyclopedia Ii - History Of Apple Computer - Pre-foundation
Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple, he was an electronics hacker. By 1975, he was working at Hewlett-Packard and helping his friend St...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Operating System: Encyclopedia Ii - Operating System - Today's Operating Systems
Command line interface (or CLI) OS's such as DOS, use only the keyboard for input. Modern OS's use a mouse for input with a graphical use...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Architecture: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Architecture - History
In 1981, a team led by John L. Hennessy at Stanford University started work on what would become the first MIPS processor. The basic conc...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Microprocessor: Encyclopedia Ii - Microprocessor - History
Microprocessor - The first microprocessors. As with many advances in technology, the microprocessor was an idea whose time had come. Th...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Scumm: Encyclopedia Ii - Scumm - Versions
SCUMM - Version 1. Maniac Mansion (Commodore 64, NES, and original PC versions) Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (Commodore 64 ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Magnum: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Magnum - Components
MIPS Magnum - Processors. As mentioned, the MIPS Magnum 3000 includes a MIPS R3000A processor running at either 25 MHz or 33 MHz. The M...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Front Side Bus: Encyclopedia Ii - Front Side Bus - Overclocking And Related Bus Speeds
Front side bus - CPU. The frequency at which a processor (CPU) operates is determined by applying a clock multiplier to the front side ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Instructions Per Clock: Encyclopedia Ii - Instructions Per Clock - Explanation
Instructions Per Clock - Calculation of IPC. The number of instructions per second for a processor can be derived by multiplying the in...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Parrot Virtual Machine: Encyclopedia Ii - Parrot Virtual Machine - Static And Dynamic Languages
The differing properties of statically and dynamically typed languages have motivated the design of Parrot. Current popular virtual machi...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Vax: Encyclopedia Ii - Vax - History
The first VAX model sold was the VAX-11/780, which became available in 1978. The architect of this model was Bill Strecker. Many differen...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Endianness: Encyclopedia Ii - Endianness - Logical And Arithmetical Description
When some computers store a 32-bit integer value in memory, for example 4A3B2C1D at address 100, they store the bytes within the address ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia Ii - Cray Inc. - The Cray Research Years
Seymour Cray began working in the computing field in 1950 when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Risc: Encyclopedia Ii - Risc - Meanwhile...
While the RISC philosophy was coming into its own, new ideas about how to dramatically increase performance of the CPUs were starting to ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Red Hat Linux: Encyclopedia Ii - Red Hat Linux - Special Characteristics
Red Hat Linux is installed with a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices. It also has a built-in too...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Amd64: Encyclopedia Ii - Amd64 - Operating System Support
The following operating systems and releases support the AMD64 architecture in long mode. AMD64 - FreeBSD. Main article: FreeBSD Free...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Silicon Graphics: Encyclopedia Ii - Silicon Graphics - History
The products produced by SGI, as well as the strategies and market positions pursued by the company, have varied since SGI was founded. H...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Symbolics: Encyclopedia Ii - Symbolics - Symbolics Inc. History
Symbolics, Inc. (or simply "Symbolics") was a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later in Concord, Massa...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Tru64: Encyclopedia Ii - Tru64 - Osf/1
In 1988, during the so-called "Unix wars", DEC joined with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and others to form the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Decstation: Encyclopedia Ii - Decstation - Second Decstation Line
The second line of DECstations began with the DECstation 2100 and 3100, released in 1989, which were the first commercially available RIS...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - List Of Commercial Failures: Encyclopedia Ii - List Of Commercial Failures - Computing Flops
List of commercial failures - Hardware flops. 3Com Audrey and Kerbango The failures of these simple web and audio devices were widely...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Symmetric Multiprocessing: Encyclopedia Ii - Symmetric Multiprocessing - Advantages And Disadvantages
SMP has many uses in science, industry, and business where software is usually custom programmed for multithreaded processing. However, ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Windows Nt: Encyclopedia Ii - Windows Nt - Development
When development started in November 1988, Windows NT (using protected mode) was to be known as OS/2 3.0, the third version of the operat...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Openbsd: Encyclopedia Ii - Openbsd - Security
OpenBSD is well-known for its security focus and track record. Until June 2002, the OpenBSD website featured the slogan: "No remote hole...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Simultaneous Multithreading: Encyclopedia Ii - Simultaneous Multithreading - Details
Normal multithreading operating systems allow multiple processes and threads to utilize the processor one at a time, giving its exclusive...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Gentoo Linux: Encyclopedia Ii - Gentoo Linux - Portage
Portage is similar to the *BSD package management system called ports; in fact it was originally designed with FreeBSD's ports in mind. G...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Openvms: Encyclopedia Ii - Openvms - Features
OpenVMS can be divided into three layers: The kernel, made up of input/output, memory management, and process/time management subsystems...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Arm Architecture: Encyclopedia Ii - Arm Architecture - Design Notes
The ARM instruction set follows the 6502 in concept, but includes a number of features designed to allow the CPU to better pipeline them ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Freebsd: Encyclopedia Ii - Freebsd - Freebsd 5 Development And Changes
The last FreeBSD release before 6.x series is 5.4 [3] (released on May 2005). FreeBSD developers maintain (at least) two branches of simu...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Operating System: Encyclopedia Ii - Operating System - Today's Operating Systems
Command line interface (or CLI) OS's such as DOS, use only the keyboard for input. Modern OS's use a mouse for input with a graphical use...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Out-of-order Execution: Encyclopedia Ii - Out-of-order Execution - Basic Concept
Out-of-order execution - In-order processors. In earlier processors, the processing of instructions is normally done in these steps: I...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Slackware: Encyclopedia Ii - Slackware - Design Philosophies
Slackware - KISS. KISS, which stands for "Keep it Simple, Stupid," is a concept that explains a lot of design choices in Slackware. In ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - 64-bit: Encyclopedia Ii - 64-bit - 32 Vs 64 Bit
A change from a 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture is a fundamental alteration, as most operating systems must be extensively modified to ta...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Branch Predictor: Encyclopedia Ii - Branch Predictor - Bimodal Branch Prediction
A bimodal branch predictor has a table of two-bit saturating counters ("2-bit Smith Counters with Saturation"), indexed with the least si...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Windows Nt 3.1: Encyclopedia Ii - Windows Nt 3.1 - Nt Os/2
The project had a codename of just "NT OS", which is preserved in the filename of the Windows NT kernel, ntoskrnl.exe. Since it was targe...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Windows Xp: Encyclopedia Ii - Windows Xp - Editions
The two major editions are Windows XP Home Edition, designed for home users, and Windows XP Professional, designed for business and power...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Register File: Encyclopedia Ii - Register File - Microarchitecture
Most register files make no special provision to prevent multiple write ports from writing the same entry simultaneously. Instead, the in...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Scram: Encyclopedia Ii - Scram - Emergency Shutdown
A SCRAM is an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor - though the term has been extended to cover shutdowns of other complex operations,...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia Ii - Cray Inc. - Current Status Of Cray Inc.
As of 2004, the main product of the company is the Cray X1 combined architecture vector / MPP supercomputer. In May the same year, Cray w...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia Ii - Cray Inc. - The Sgi Years
Cray Research merged with Silicon Graphics (SGI) in February 1996. At the time the industry was highly critical of the move, noting that ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia Ii - Cray Inc. - Financial Troubles
Cray, Inc. filed an 8-K report (from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) on March 16, 2005 warning of material weaknesses in internal control over fi...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Simultaneous Multithreading: Encyclopedia Ii - Simultaneous Multithreading - Historical Implementations
This technique dates to the 1950's. Every decade seems to rediscover the technique and put a new spin on it. Although it is primarily a t...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Simultaneous Multithreading: Encyclopedia Ii - Simultaneous Multithreading - Taxonomy
In processor design, there are two ways to increase on-chip parallelism with less resource requirement:one is superscalar technique which...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia Ii - Cray Inc. - Cray Inc.
After the Tera merger, the Tera MTA system was relaunched as the Cray MTA-2. This was not a commercial success and only shipped to one cu...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Slackware: Encyclopedia Ii - Slackware - History And Name
The first Slackware release, 1.00, was released on July 16, 1993 [1] by Patrick Volkerding, founder and lead developer. It was based on t...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Endianness: Encyclopedia Ii - Endianness - Explanation
When a sequence of small units is used to form a larger ordinal value, convention must establish the order in which those smaller units a...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Amd64: Encyclopedia Ii - Amd64 - Implementations
The following processors implement the AMD64 architecture: AMD K8 AMD Athlon 64 AMD Athlon 64 X2 AMD Athlon 64 FX AMD Opteron AMD Turio...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Amd64: Encyclopedia Ii - Amd64 - Market Analysis
AMD64 represents a break with AMD's past behavior of following Intel's standards, but repeats Intel's earlier behavior of extending the x...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Amd64: Encyclopedia Ii - Amd64 - Operating Modes
AMD64 - Operating mode explanation. There are two primary modes of operation for this architecture: Long Mode  The intended prima...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Slackware: Encyclopedia Ii - Slackware - Releases
Slackware is primarily developed for the x86 PC hardware architecture. However there have previously been official ports to the DEC Alpha...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Endianness: Encyclopedia Ii - Endianness - Endianness In Communications
In general, the NUXI problem is the problem of transferring data between computers with differing byte order. For example, the string "UN...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Simultaneous Multithreading: Encyclopedia Ii - Simultaneous Multithreading - Modern Commercial Implementations
The Intel Pentium 4 was the first modern commercial processor to implement simultaneous multithreading, starting from the 3.06GHz model r...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia Ii - Cray Inc. - Financial Troubles
Cray, Inc. filed an 8-K report (from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) on March 16, 2005 warning of material weaknesses in internal control over fi...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Endianness: Encyclopedia Ii - Endianness - Discussion Background Etymology
Big-endian numbers are easier to read when debugging a program. Some think they are less intuitive because the most significant byte is a...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Endianness: Encyclopedia Ii - Endianness - Endianness In Date Formats
Endianness is simply illustrated by the different manners in which countries format calendar dates. For example, in the United States and...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Cray Inc.: Encyclopedia Ii - Cray Inc. - The Sgi Years
Cray Research merged with Silicon Graphics (SGI) in February 1996. At the time the industry was highly critical of the move, noting that ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Front Side Bus: Encyclopedia Ii - Front Side Bus - Current Usage
Most modern buses (both GTL+ and EV6 from DEC Alpha) serve as a backbone between the CPU and a chipset. This chipset (usually a combinati...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Magnum: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Magnum - Operating Systems
MIPS Magnum - Windows NT. The MIPS Magnum R4000 ran either Windows NT (beginning with version 3.1) when equipped with the little-endian...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Magnum: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Magnum - Historical Development
The MIPS Magnum 3000 used a MIPS R3000 processor and a custom, proprietary motherboard which incorporated the Turbochannel bus licensed f...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Openvms: Encyclopedia Ii - Openvms - History
OpenVMS - Origin and name changes. In April, 1975, DIGITAL embarked on a hardware project, code named Star, to design a 32-bit virtual ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Magnum: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Magnum - Series
Model number information. MIPS Magnum - MIPS Magnum 3000. Alternative model name: MIPS RC3230 Release: March, 1990 Initial price: $900...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Windows Xp: Encyclopedia Ii - Windows Xp - Copying Restrictions
Microsoft Windows XP service packs are designed so that they will not install on computers running installations of Windows XP that use p...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Architecture: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Architecture - Mips Cpu Family
The first commercial MIPS CPU, model, the R2000, was announced in 1985. It added multiple-cycle multiply and divide instructions in a som...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Architecture: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Architecture - Mips Programming And Emulation
There is a freely available "MIPS R2000/R3000 Simulator" called SPIM for several operating systems (specifically Unix or GNU/Linux; Mac O...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Architecture: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Architecture - Other Models And Future Plans
Other members of the MIPS family include the R6000, an ECL implementation of the MIPS architecture which was produced by Bipolar Integrat...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Architecture: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Architecture - Applications
Among the manufacturers which made computer workstation systems using MIPS processors are SGI, MIPS Computer Systems, Inc., Olivetti, Sie...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - History Of Apple Computer: Encyclopedia Ii - History Of Apple Computer - 2003 To Present
Initially, the Apple Stores were opened in the U.S. only, but in late 2003, Apple opened its first Apple Store outside the USA, in Tokyo'...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Operating System: Encyclopedia Ii - Operating System - Introduction
Early computers lacked operating systems. A human operator would manually load and run programs. When programs were developed to load and...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - History Of Apple Computer: Encyclopedia Ii - History Of Apple Computer - Apple Iii And Lisa
By the 1980s, Apple faced emerging competition in the personal computing business. Chief among them was IBM, the first "big name" in comp...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - History Of Apple Computer: Encyclopedia Ii - History Of Apple Computer - Early Years
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ("the two Steves") had been friends for some time, having met in 1971, when their mutual friend, Bill Fernan...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Mips Architecture: Encyclopedia Ii - Mips Architecture - Mips Cores
In recent years most of the technology used in the various MIPS generations has been offered as building-blocks for embedded processor de...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Out-of-order Execution: Encyclopedia Ii - Out-of-order Execution - Execute And Writeback Decoupling Allows Program Restart
The queue for results is necessary to resolve issues as branch mispredictions and exceptions/traps. The results queue allows programs to ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - History Of Apple Computer: Encyclopedia Ii - History Of Apple Computer - The Macintosh
The Lisa project was removed from Jobs' control midway through development to prevent another Apple III incident and Jobs soon turned his...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Out-of-order Execution: Encyclopedia Ii - Out-of-order Execution - History
Out-of-order execution is a restricted form of data flow computation, which was a major research area in computer architecture in the 197...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Operating System: Encyclopedia Ii - Operating System - Common Core Services
As operating systems evolve, ever more services are expected to be common core. Since the 1990s, OS's have often been required to provide...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - History Of Apple Computer: Encyclopedia Ii - History Of Apple Computer - 1998 To 2003
After discontinuing Apple's licensing of its operating system to third-party computer manufacturers, one of Jobs's first moves as new act...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - History Of Apple Computer: Encyclopedia Ii - History Of Apple Computer - 1984 To 1997
Apple now had two separate, incompatible platforms: Apple II, the affordable, expandable home computer, and Macintosh, the closed platfor...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Register File: Encyclopedia Ii - Register File - Implementation
The usual layout convention is that a simple array is read out vertically. That is, a single word line, which runs horizontally, causes a...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Symmetric Multiprocessing: Encyclopedia Ii - Symmetric Multiprocessing - Entry Level Systems
Entry level servers and workstations with two processors dominate the SMP market today. The most popular entry level SMP systems use the...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Gentoo Linux: Encyclopedia Ii - Gentoo Linux - History
Founder Daniel Robbins recalls the birth of the Gentoo Linux distribution in a three-part article series, Making the Distribution On Apri...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Gentoo Linux: Encyclopedia Ii - Gentoo Linux - Portability
Gentoo was originally designed for the x86 architecture, but it has been ported to many others due to the highly-portable nature of Linux...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Freebsd: Encyclopedia Ii - Freebsd - Derivatives
A range of open source and commercial products are directly and/or indirectly based on FreeBSD, including Juniper routers, Apple's Mac OS...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Freebsd: Encyclopedia Ii - Freebsd - Linux Compatibility
FreeBSD provides binary compatibility with several other UNIX-like operating systems, including Linux. The reasoning behind this is gener...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Freebsd: Encyclopedia Ii - Freebsd - History And Development
Initial development of FreeBSD was started in 1993, and took its sources from 386BSD. However, due to concerns about the legality of all ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Freebsd: Encyclopedia Ii - Freebsd - Ports Collection
The FreeBSD Ports Collection provides an easy and consistent way of installing software ported to FreeBSD. It uses Makefiles laid out in ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Gentoo Linux: Encyclopedia Ii - Gentoo Linux - Init System
Gentoo's init system is another important feature of its system. It is similar to the System V init system that most Linux distributions ...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Gentoo Linux: Encyclopedia Ii - Gentoo Linux - Installation
Gentoo may be installed in several ways. The most common way to install it is by using the Gentoo Live CD, but as with any Linux distribu...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Openbsd: Encyclopedia Ii - Openbsd - History
In December 1994, Theo de Raadt, a co-founder and member of the NetBSD core team for two years, was asked to resign his position, and his...   » Read the article

Encyclopedia - Openbsd: Encyclopedia Ii - Openbsd - Releases
OpenBSD issues new versions every six months, each of which is supported for one year after release. During this time, stable CVS trees f...   » Read the article