Waxing Philosophical

[Eugene Chu]

I started using Alphas in our project for number crunching type apps, and
they were much better than the x86 platforms of the time.  Unfortunately,
the rest of the industry seemed to think that it was a dead platform,
so there was very little support of commercial software.  It became a
self-fulfilling prophecy; the lack of support made the platform less
useful, which accelerated its demise.

We are now running Opterons for this reason.  It's important to be able
to get support for certain functionality; home-grown only takes you so
far.

eyc