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))

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