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:

    “Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.”
    —Miguel De Cervantes (1547–1616)

    “Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.”
    —Herman Melville (1819–1891)