Digital marks Intel territory with its low-end Alpha chip

Digital Equipment made a foray into the Intel chip market last week with the launch of a pared-down Alpha chip designed for corporate PCs.

The systems supplier said that PCs running its new Alpha chips will start at under $2,600 (#1,635) and will be comparable in performance to Intel's Klamath-based machines.

Digital has already sold samples of the 21164PC chip to PC makers including German PC retailer Vobis Microcomputer - a long-standing Alpha partner - and US-based Enorex Microsystems.

John Fortune, product manager for Alpha at Digital Semiconductor, said the company wants to sell millions of the chips by 2000.

'Vobis and Enorex are our first horizontal partners but there are quite a few folks in various vertical markets interested in the chip,' he said.

Anne Powell, senior analyst at Datapro, believes that the Alpha 21164PC microprocessor is 'without a doubt an excellent chip. But its chances for success aren't that great in the low-end PC market. The proportion of people in the industry opting for alternatives to Intel is pretty low.'

She added: 'In places where Digital is an established PC vendor or where people are already running Alpha-based Unix or NT boxes, the chip ought to do well. Outside that, it will be harder to argue.'

Digital claims that around 6,000 software programs designed for Pentium-based machines running NT can run native on the new Alpha chip.

'There are 18,000 software applications that run native on Alpha and with FX!32 binary translation the machines can run any Windows application at the same performance as the Pentium Pro,' said Fortune.

The chip will ship in volume in July and will be available in three clock speeds - 400MHz, 466MHz and 533MHz.