Just to toss this in, AMD licenced Alpha technology from Compaq for their 
Thunderbird line of Athlon x86 CPUs and motherboards to boost floating point 
performance where AMD's x86 CPUs have historically been sluggish and to boost front-
side bus speeds. This isn't very widely-known for one reason or another, but it's 
significant because Intel's purchase of Alpha from Compaq might not only be to get 
some better insight into a real 64-bit architecture but to prevent AMD, now a major 
competitor in the PC market since Gateway gave Intel the finger a year or so ago, 
from licensing any more Alpha technology for Sledgehammer. Just a thought!

Wes
xunil@lactating-monkeys.net

---- Original Message ----
From:		Brian Chase
Date:		Mon 6/25/01 22:50
To:		Paul A Vixie
Cc:		NetBSD Vax Port, NetBSD Alpha Port
Subject:	Re: Slightly Off-Topic... 

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Paul A Vixie wrote:

> > given the current crop of CPUs that are available.  which would you all
> > choose to base a computer around?
>
> i don't know what to make of amd's sledgehammer effort.  did they can it?
> did they ever tape out?  are there any design wins anywhere?  still adrift?

It's not dead yet.  In fact just a couple of days ago there was an
announcement about Wasabi porting NetBSD to it (or the simulator provided
by AMD.)

  http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/#x86_64
  http://www.x86-64.org/

If SledgeHammer becomes a reality, I think this might be a good CPU for
the job.  I know it supports the x86 instruction set, but doesn't it also
have a cleaner mode in which it can operate?  Time to read up on it I
guess.

-brian.