By the end, and even the last few years, the Alpha was no longer as fast as competing processors for the vast majority of workloads. The x86 architecture had become RISC behind the scenes and Intel and AMD had figured out ways to accelerate CISC to the point where it may have even been a net win for performance (or at least not a significant loss...smaller numbers of instructions had to traverse the slow RAM to CPU bus, and could then be "decompressed" into fast executing but more verbose instructions all within the CPU pipeline, where the bus was dramatically faster--raw clock speed had just caught up to the Alpha, but performance was significantly better, and by 2003 when the last ever Alpha clocked at 1.3GHz the Athlon 64 was released with clocks up to 2GHz). Others, like Sun and IBM and others, had made more progress on the parallelization and shared memory fronts, as well, making Alpha less useful for scientific and other large scale computing work.
Finally, the Alpha technology was sold off to Intel. The advantages of the architecture (and some of the engineers involved) have been assimilated into the CPU borg. It may be ugly, due to such a long and sordid history, but the x86 architecture is now wicked fast. Also the Alpha had elephantine power and cooling requirements. My last company once attended an event where we setup our boxes side by side with a competitors Alpha-based systems, and they had discreetly placed a box fan behind their biggest unit, because, without it, the ambient temperature of the room was too high for the Alpha box to operate reliably. Their box was much faster than ours though. I asked if they included a box fan, or if that cost extra.
But don't let me stand in the way of nostalgia. I, too, remember staring in awe at a DEC that was running at 400MHz, when the Intel architectures were still stumbling along at 166, or something along those lines (and with a dramatically slower bus, and only dual CPU capability in the Pentium Pro).
Are you sure? I don't have the numbers handy, but I dimly remember that, in around 1998-1999, the Alpha 21264 ran circles around Intel and AMD CPUs of the same era, in integer and especially floating-point performance. I'm not talking about clock speed, but SPEC benchmark results.
Yes, I'm sure. The only date I specifically mentioned was 2003, which is when the last Alpha was released and the 64 bit x86 architecture became available. In 1998-1999 the Alpha was still probably in the lead on all counts except possibly price/performance. Things move fast in CPUs, and a significant lead one year can turn into a trailing position the very next.
Well... By 2003 the Alpha has been more or less abandoned in terms of R&D expenditures. It's impossible to estimate how much of its perceived lack of relative performance was due to progresses in x86 designs and how much was simply due to a lack of research in progressing the architecture.
