Script for "Attack Alpha" slide presentation -------------------------------------------- Slide 1: DEC's Financials implicate that there will be future R&D cuts with people layoffs of over 20,000 employees. Cutbacks may impact OSF/1 environment development on the new Alpha AXP platforms. The sales and support staffing at DEC will also be cut back, meaning that small to mid-size companies may be dealing with third-party companies for software solutions and support, rather than DEC's direct sales and support staff. Slide 2: Although DEC strongly emphasizes that migration from the DEC VAX lines or DECsystem lines to Alpha will be easy, customers should consider the facts. . Full production environments for either OSF/1 or OpenVMS will not be ready on Alpha platforms until 1994 at the earliest. . Using tools like DEC's translator "VEST" will not provide 100% efficiency. Translated code on an Alpha will run only as fast as it would on a VAX, best case. In addition, VEST will only flag problem areas in the code, such as detecting unaligned data, floating point references, non-standard coding practices, references to VMS data, etc. All these problem areas will have to be modified by the programmer in the original source code. There are also several problems that VEST cannot detect, such as synchronization problems, page-size dependencies, etc -- all of which can cause catastrophic problems during runtime. . This is the first time DEC has ever developed RISC-based compilers -- and it will be impossible for DEC to tune it optimally on first release. RISC compiler technology takes 1-2 years or more to tune, as past history proves. Keep in mind that DEC will need to tune three separate operating system environments for Alpha. . DEC will not have SMP support on Alpha until mid '93. . C, Fortran, and COBOL programs will require source code changes since there are a number of differences in the languages and compilers on Alpha from what they were on VAX or DECsystems. Conclusions of the above points are that: 1. At this time, there are very few ported applications to Alpha. Only 50-75 are estimated to exist, with 500 planned by mid '93 and 1000 by the end of '93. Compare that to the thousands of applications available with HP-UX. 2. Since several of the languages and development tools have not been ported to Alpha, as the next slide shows, application development on Alpha is difficult if not impossible. 3. Given the problems with translated code using "VEST", the fact that DEC has yet to release OLTP benchmark data on Alpha, and unproven RISC compilers, significant application performance improvement by porting to Alpha can't be guaranteed. Slide 3: OSF/1, OpenVMS for AXP (Alpha) lag HP-UX by at least 1-2 years, in the categories of symmetric multiprocessing, full language support, networking services, high availability, TP monitors, and DCE services. These capabilities are required by in most mission critical commercial computing environments and clearly illustrates that Alpha platforms will not be suitable in these environments until mid 1994 or later. Slide 4: Our Alpha AXP vs. HP PA-RISC performance comparison between comparably positioned models in the HP 9000 line and Alpha AXP line shows comparable technical performance as measured in SPECint92 and SPECfp92 benchmarks. DEC has not released any commercial benchmark information on the Alpha systems. However, according to our best estimates on Alpha OLTP performance, we have performance positioned the Alpha systems with our HP 9000 line. Slides 5-6: As can be seen from these slides, the multiprocessor configurations for Alpha systems are not available until around mid '93. These future systems are shown on these slides as having comparable performance to our present HP 9000 systems. In 1993, HP will be making significant performance enhancements to the present line with higher levels of PA 7100 multiprocessing. Slide 7: Key questions that customers should ask DEC when evaluating Alpha AXP systems should be: 1. Why has DEC not published commercial benchmark results for Alpha AXP? There has been some speculation by consultants that DEC has not been able to get an acceptable level of OLTP performance scaling and that RISC compilers have not been optimally tuned as of yet. Any customer considering these platforms for commercial environments should be looking at more appropriate measures of performance like TPC-A rather than the technical SPEC benchmark results DEC has been publishing. 2. When will full functionality OpenVMS and OSF/1 really be available on Alpha AXP? Without a full suite of application development tools, languages, networking, etc., these platforms are not really viable for mission critical production commercial environments. 3. What is DEC's commitment to UNIX capability? Right now, DEC does not have a production quality high-performance UNIX environment available. It's DECsystem line has a high-end commercial performance of only around 30 TPS. An end-user production quality OSF/1 operating system will not be available on Alpha until Q2 '93 and a full functionality environment for OSF/1 on Alpha will not be ready until 1994 or later. 4. When will a robust application portfolio be available on Alpha AXP? At present there are only around 50 applications that have been ported to Alpha. At the end of '93, only DEC is claiming to have around 1000 applications ported. Yet only one third of these are expected to be OSF/1 based.