DEC Alpha - Design Principles

Design Principles

The Alpha architecture was intended to be a high-performance design. Digital intended the architecture to support a one-thousandfold increase in performance over twenty-five years. To ensure this, any architectural feature that impeded multiple instruction issue, clock rate or multiprocessing was removed. As a result, the Alpha does not have:

  • Branch delay slots
  • Suppressed instructions
  • Byte load or store instructions (later added with the Byte Word Extensions (BWX))

Read more about this topic:  DEC Alpha

Famous quotes containing the words design and/or principles:

    “Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.”
    —Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)

    “It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most persevering researches.”
    —Frederick The Great (1712–1786)