What is an Alpha?
A. The Alpha family of microprocessors are a high-performance, 64 bit, super scalar, super pipelined, RISC processor from Digital Equipment Corporation. The microprocessor was designed with a clean slate with no historical “baggage” (i.e., extra functions built in hardware to maintain backwards compatibility with previous implementations of CPUs) making for an efficient design. The design was made with a minimal number of restrictions and in a very open fashion. This allows growth of the Alpha architecture as new technologies become available and prevents the family from experiencing growth limitations due to architectural decisions made years or decades earlier. (An example would be the addition of the MVI — Motion Video Instructions — to the 21164PC implementation that allow the chip to decode multiple live video streams plus encode an MPEG video in software, in real time!) This “no limits” approach also makes the microprocessor flexible — it supports a variety of operating system
