Cray built a massively parallel machine out of a bunch of Alphas. (Cray Research Inc, iirc, not Seymour Cray). The T3 I think.
DEC had bragged about the features of the cpu useful for parallelization. Cray engineering complained about the features missing for parallelization. It was all described in a glossy Cray monthly magazine description of the new machine but I've been unable to locate a copy.
I disliked the Alpha floating point, it was always signalling exceptions for underflow. Otherwise a fine set of machines.
> I disliked the Alpha floating point, it was always signalling exceptions for underflow.
Alpha floating point wasn't the problem.
The problem was that a whole bunch of "clever" folks used "underflow" for all manner of weird reasons on x86. So, whenever Alpha either ran ported or emulated x86 code, it ran into underflows with far greater frequency than any actual numerical applications ever would.
DEC had bragged about the features of the cpu useful for parallelization. Cray engineering complained about the features missing for parallelization. It was all described in a glossy Cray monthly magazine description of the new machine but I've been unable to locate a copy.
I disliked the Alpha floating point, it was always signalling exceptions for underflow. Otherwise a fine set of machines.