DEC, partners to push Alpha system

Electronic News, June 16, 1997 by Gale Bradley

Digital, along with its Alpha microprocessor partners Samsung and Mitsubishi, will launch a marketing campaign to create awareness of Alpha architecture among power Microsoft Windows NT users. Digital says this, in turn, will show OEMs they must deliver Alpha CPU systems.

Digital Semiconductor's Linda Sanders, marketing director, noted in an interview that the company wants to establish a beachhead in what is today largely Intel territory.

"What we're doing is creating a beachhead with the visual computing users, letting them know the performance advantages of Alpha," Ms. Sanders said. "OEMs fill market demand rather than create it," she said, so DEC sees its first priority as being with the customers who will talk to the OEMs.

Despite the three semiconductor concerns getting together literally and figuratively under the one "AlphaPowered" banner, Digital has two very different relationships with the two Asian giants. Mitsubishi Electric and Digital co-designed the more economical 21164PC chip (EN, March 17) and will each manufacture and market it, Mitsubishi's John Branigan, marketing manager, said. Samsung will also market the 21164PC, but was otherwise not in on this agreement.

Samsung told Electronic News last week, however, that a concurrent driving down of Alpha prices will happen. Samsung and Digital's relationship started with the 21164 licensing, but really kicks in with the two companies' ongoing collaboration on the next-generation 21264, according to Y.J. Kim, senior marketing manager at Samsung Semiconductor of San Jose, Calif.

Mr. Kim told EN that Samsung is "finalizing that tape-out right now." With the data tape transfer for the 21264 processor nearing shipment to Samsung fabs now, the 600MHz-plus CPUs should be leaving those fabs by the end of the year.

"We are a dynamic team," Mr. Kim said of Digital and Samsung, "With engineering and design from Digital and process development and manufacturing from Samsung. We are going to start knocking on some doors." The Alpha triumvirate may find some of those doors opening because one of Digital's goals in bringing in Asian manufacturers was a quick drive-down of Alpha prices, according to Mr. Kim.

Driving Alpha To The Masses

"Before, (the Alpha) was sexy, strong and expensive. It won't be anymore. DEC wants that, they want us to drive Alpha to the masses," Mr. Kim said.

Meanwhile, on the Alpha OEM front, Digital Semiconductor will be showing the Ruffian RPX workstation/servers from eight-year-old Digital partner DeskStation Technology of Lenexa, Kan. DeskStation is also now selling for $1,350 (OEM quantity price) the Ruffian RPX 164-2 motherboard which supports the Alpha 21164 microprocessor at 600MHz. The motherboard uses the new 21174 (known as "Pyxis" internally) core logic chip that can support 128-bit memory access at speeds up to 66MHz.

The RPXs offer six PCI slots, on-board Ultra-Wide SCSI, on-board 10/100Mbs Ethernet, six Dual In-Line Memory Module sockets (DIMMs) to boost memory capacity to 768Mb, and two MB of fast synchronous cache; starting price is $5,995. Standard on the system is the Matrox Millenium graphics card; options include S3 or Open GL-based graphics accelerators.

DeskStation is a loyal customer of DEC's. DeskStation pointed out that using the 21174 core logic enables the RPX motherboard to support faster 21164 CPUs--whether from Digital, Mitsubishi, or Samsung--without hardware modifications.

In conjunction with its PC Expo introductions, DeskStation is seemingly stepping in where the top tier OEMs with workstation aspirations (e.g. Compaq and Dell) have feared to dread. DeskStation has a new OEM strategy to build custom Alpha-based systems for corporate volume buyers and specialized markets such as entertainment/animation, electronic pre-press, CAD/CAM, and Internet/intranet. The company will also license the 164-2 motherboard and firmware to other developers of Alpha-based systems.

DeskStation is among about 20 OEMs currently purchasing the Alpha microprocessors; another is German vendor Vobis, which has also been an early adopter of AMD's K6. Mitsubishi's Mr. Branigan said OEM relationships for the 21164PC from his company are still in "the crawling stages" and not ready for announcement; there are no plans for Mitsubishi to build Alpha systems.

But Samsung, characteristically, was more aggressive. Samsung will make and sell Alpha workstations for the domestic Korean market, but refrain from doing so in North America to stay away from its OEM customers' turf. "For our customers like Sun and Compaq, we'll prefer to sell them only the Alpha chips. These companies remember when memory was in very short supply and Samsung was good to them. They gained significant market share then," Mr. Kim said.

And On The X86 Front

On the x86 architecture front, Digital's Systems division will be showing its AMD-K6 MMX-based PCs which have been added to its "value-priced PC client product line," a fact to which AMD chairman and CEO Jerry Sanders alluded in a meeting with AMD shareholders here in April (EN, April 28).