The Alpha processor from the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) is the first non-Intel-based processor on which Linux was commercially available and is substantially different from its Intel cousins. The most significant difference is that the Alpha AXP is a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), as compared to the Intel, which is a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC). Without turning this book into a textbook on microprocessor design, I can simply say that the difference is that RISC has fewer instructions (the instruction set is reduced) and therefore takes more instructions to do a specific job. A CISC processor has more instructions and takes fewer instructions to do the same job.

Imagine someone told you to stand up and open the door. The CISC instruction might simply say, “Go open the door.” Using what’s built into your CPU (your brain), you know to translate this to “stand up and open the door.” On the other hand, the RISC instructions might be “Stand up. Turn left and take two paces forward. Turn right, and take three paces forward. Raise right hand, etc.” There might then be a CISC instruction that says, “Go open the window.” However, the RISC instructions might be “Stand up. Turn left, and take two paces forward. Turn left, and take three paces forward, etc.”

Not only does the CISC give fewer instructions, it also requires less logic circuitry. As a result, an Alpha AXP processor can run at higher speeds than an Intel. This does not make the Alpha AXP intrinsically faster! Take our example. I simply tell you to open the window, and you do it. However, giving you each instruction individually takes more time. One significant difference is that when the PentiumPro just broke the 200Mhz barrier, the Alphas were more than twice that.

Even if the increase in clock speed is not considered, the design of the Alpha AXP enables it to do more work per cycle. Several issues were addressed to help eliminate any aspect of the processor that would hinder multiple instruction issues. For example, there are no branch delay or skip instructions. As a result of its design, the Alpha AXP (as of this writing) can get up to 10 new instructions per cycle.

In addition, the Alpha AXP was designed to run with multiple processors, though that’s not to say that it can’t run as a single processor. The Alpha AXP was designed with several instructions that simplify adding multiple processors. Unlike other processors, this functionality was designed from the beginning and didn’t have to be built onto an existing system.

One advantage of Alpha AXP is that it doesn’t have a lot of baggage to carry around. The Intel 80×86 family is based on the 8086 and is completely backward-compatible. If you have an 8086 program, it will run on an PentiumPro. The Alpha AXP was developed with a full 64-bit architecture, although it has a few 32-bit operations for backward compatibility.

Part of the 64-bit architecture is the Alphas 64-bit virtual address space. All values (registers, addresses, integers, etc.) are operated on as full 64-bit quantities. Unlike with the Intel processors, there are no segmented addresses. In some cases, the operating system may restrict the number of bits that is used to translate the virtual address; however, at least 43 bits are used.

Like the Intel, Alphas memory protection is done on a per-page basis. The design of the paging mechanism in Intel specifies a 4KiB page, but the Alpha AXP can have 8KiB, 16KiB, 32KiB, or even 64KiB pages. In addition, the Alpha AXP also uses many-to-one page mapping, as does the Intel, so that multiple processors can have a virtual memory address that references the same page in physical memory.

The Alpha AXP architecture is a 64-bit load/store RISC architecture designed with speed in mind. All registers are 64 bits in length; 32 integer registers and 32 floating point registers. Integer register 31 and floating point register 31 are used for null operations. A read from them generates a zero value and a write to them has no effect. All instructions are 32 bits long and memory operations are either reads or writes. The architecture allows different implementations so long as the implementations follow the architecture.

There are no instructions that operate directly on values stored in memory; all data manipulation is done between registers. So, if you want to increment a counter in memory, you first read it into a register, then modify it and write it out. The instructions only interact with each other by one instruction writing to a register or memory location and another register reading that register or memory location. One interesting feature of Alpha AXP is that there are instructions that can generate flags, such as testing if two registers are equal, the result is not stored in a processor status register, but is instead stored in a third register. This may seem strange at first, but removing this dependency from a status register means that it is much easier to build a CPU which can issue multiple instructions every cycle. Instructions on unrelated registers do not have to wait for each other to execute as they would if there were a single status register. The lack of direct operations on memory and the large number of registers also help issue multiple instructions.

The Alpha AXP architecture uses a set of subroutines, called privileged architecture library code (PALcode). PALcode is specific to the operating system, the CPU implementation of the Alpha AXP architecture and to the system hardware. These subroutines provide operating system primitives for context switching, interrupts, exceptions and memory management. These subroutines can be invoked by hardware or by CALL_PAL instructions. PALcode is written in standard Alpha AXP assembler with some implementation specific extensions to provide direct access to low level hardware functions, for example internal processor registers. PALcode is executed in PALmode, a privileged mode that stops some system events happening and allows the PALcode complete control of the physical system hardware.