Alpha

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DEC Alpha or just Alpha is a 64-bit RISC CPU architecture created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and later developed by Compaq, mainly targeted at the workstation and server market.

Features

• Thirty-two 64-bit general purpose registers, R0 to R31
  • R31 always yields zero when read, writes are discarded
• Thirty-two double-precision (quadword, 64-bit) floating point registers, F0 to F31
  • F31 same as with its integer counterpart, this is always zero
• Bi-endian
• SIMD instruction set extension, the Motion Video Instructions (MVI)

Compiler support

• GCC
• Compaq Compiler Kit

Emulator support

• QEMU (qemu-system-alpha)
• AXPbox
• Open SIMH

External links

• AlphaLinux wiki
• The Alpha AXP Review of the Alpha architecture by Raymond Chen