Pete Bannon, one of the key architects behind the touted Alpha processor, and a number of other Alpha engineers are joining Intel to work on future versions of Itanium.
Bannon and approximately 50 Alpha engineers will move from Hewlett-Packard to Intel this month, the company announced this week. The transition is the latest stage in a technological wagon train that began in 2001 as the result of a massive development agreement between the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker and Compaq Computer, which at the time controlled Alpha.
Around 300 former Alpha engineers already work at Intel. By the time the agreement is concluded, more than 450 are expected to move to Intel, company spokeswoman Barbara Grimes said. Most of the Alpha alumni are working on a version of the Itanium that will follow Montecito, a version of Itanium with two separate processors in a single piece of silicon coming in 2005.
Although the Alpha chip has never sold as well as other server chips, such as the UltraSparc family from Sun Microsystems, analysts and engineers have praised its performance. Digital Equipment first released the chip in the early 1990s. Compaq acquired Alpha in 1998 when it bought Digital, and HP became the owner when it bought Compaq.