Talk:DEC Alpha/Archives/2020

ISA or Microprocessor or Computer chip
The first sentence says that Alpha is an Instruction Set Architecture. It is very important that the first sentence is understandable to many readers (accessible). My intuition is that few know what an ISA is. From the article I get the impression that one could just as well say that Alpha is a family of microprocessors. Is this right? Even more accessible would be to say that it is a family of computer chips. That would then need to be qualified, of course. --Ettrig (talk) 05:48, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * We need to speak about the Alpha instruction set architecture in some page. We could, I suppose, have a page for the Alpha instruction set architecture and another page for the sequence of Alpha microprocessors; that would be similar to the separate pages for the IBM System/360 line of computers and the IBM System/360 architecture.  However, the concept of an instruction set architecture is important enough that I don't think we should avoid talking about it.  (The same applies to the concept of a microprocessor.) Guy Harris (talk) 16:21, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * My impression is that Alpha is BOTH an ISA and a processor family. (And an architecture, meaning all the general principles of the processor family.) So the suggestion is not to remove any information about the ISA aspect. I just want to start out by saying that it is a family of computer processors. The ISA is one of the aspects that define this family. Right? --Ettrig (talk) 20:29, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Your last sentence hits the nail on the head: "The ISA is one of the aspects that define this family." That is, in principle, there could have been other processor families using the same ISA, the same way that there are multiple processor families that implement the ARM ISA and the x86-64 ISA. As it happens, there were no other processor families implementing Alpha. But that doesn't make it any less of an ISA.
 * I am not even sure what a "family of processors" is. --Macrakis (talk) 21:24, 7 October 2020 (UTC)