Editing DEC Alpha (section)

===RISCy VAX===
As the meeting broke up, Bob Supnik was approached by [[Ken Olsen]], who stated that the RISC chips appeared to be a future threat to their VAX line. He asked Supnik to consider what might be done with VAX to keep it competitive with future RISC systems.<ref name="microprism"/>

This led to the formation of the "RISCy VAX" team. They initially considered three concepts. One was a cut-down version of the VAX [[instruction set architecture]] (ISA) that would run on a RISC-like system and leave more complex VAX instructions to system subroutines. Another concept was a pure RISC system that would translate existing VAX code into its own ISA on-the-fly and store it in a [[CPU cache]]. Finally, there was still the possibility of a much faster CISC processor running the complete VAX ISA. Unfortunately, all of these approaches introduced overhead and would not be competitive with a pure-RISC machine running native RISC code.<ref name="comerford">{{cite journal |first=Richard |last=Comerford |title=How DEC developed Alpha |journal=[[IEEE Spectrum]] |volume=29 |issue=7 |date=July 1992 |page=28 |doi=10.1109/6.144508 |url=https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/144508 |access-date=2021-10-23 |archive-date=2018-06-20 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180620235313/https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/144508/ |url-status=live}}</ref>

The group then considered hybrid systems that combined one of their existing VAX one-chip solution and a RISC chip as a coprocessor used for high-performance needs. These studies suggested that the system would inevitably be hamstrung by the lower-performance part and would offer no compelling advantage. It was at this point that Nancy Kronenberg pointed out that people ran VMS, not VAX, and that VMS only had a few hardware dependencies based on its modelling of [[interrupt]]s and memory paging. There appeared to be no compelling reason why VMS could not be ported to a RISC chip as long as these small bits of the model were preserved. Further work on this concept suggested this was a workable approach.<ref name="comerford"/>

Supnik took the resulting report to the Strategy Task Force in February 1989. Two questions were raised: could the resulting RISC design also be a performance leader in the Unix market, and should the machine be an open standard? And with that, the decision was made to adopt the PRISM architecture with the appropriate modifications. This became the "EVAX" concept, a follow-on to the successful CMOS [[CVAX]] implementation. When management accepted the findings, they decided to give the project a more neutral name, removing "VAX", eventually settling on Alpha.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/foreword.htm |title=Foreword |first=Bob |last=Supnik |journal=Digital Technical Journal |volume=4 |issue=4 |date=1992 |access-date=2021-05-03 |archive-date=2021-05-03 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210503222246/https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol4num4/foreword.htm |url-status=live}}</ref> The name was inspired by the use of "Omega" as the codename of an [[NVAX]]-based [[VAX 4000]] model; "Alpha" was intended to signify the beginning of a new line (with reference to [[Alpha and Omega]]).<ref>{{cite interview |last=Supnik|first=Robert|interviewer=Gardner Hendrie|title=Robert Supnik Oral History|url=https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2019/07/102738263-05-01-acc.pdf |publisher=Computer History Museum|date=2017-05-02|website=computerhistory.org|access-date=2024-04-06}}</ref> Soon after, work began on [[OpenVMS#Port to Alpha|a port of VMS to the new architecture]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/48380/managingtechnolo00katz.pdf|date=April 1993|title=Managing Technological Leaps: A study of DEC's Alpha Design Team|access-date=2021-04-26|archive-date=2021-02-07|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210207063545/https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/48380/managingtechnolo00katz.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref>