There was a second problem with that, Digital proved in court that Intel stole their architecture to put into the Pentium.
Part of the settlement was that Intel had to fab for Digital for a long time and pay for a bunch of their patents. The Digital folks made it sound like it was a victory for them but it felt like the beginning of the end, and sure enough it was.
I think Alpha's big problem was people were still migrating to 32 bit code and here was a bunch of smartasses trying to push 64 bit processors 10 years before x86-64 became the flagship for Intel-compatible processors. During the time when 'Internet time' was a thing people said regularly and unironically. 10 years was forever.
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There was a second problem with that, Digital proved in court that Intel stole their architecture to put into the Pentium.
Part of the settlement was that Intel had to fab for Digital for a long time and pay for a bunch of their patents. The Digital folks made it sound like it was a victory for them but it felt like the beginning of the end, and sure enough it was.
I think Alpha's big problem was people were still migrating to 32 bit code and here was a bunch of smartasses trying to push 64 bit processors 10 years before x86-64 became the flagship for Intel-compatible processors. During the time when 'Internet time' was a thing people said regularly and unironically. 10 years was forever.