Once more we have received NDA details of Compaq's future plans on microprocessors and operating systems. And although we have already published quite a lot of this information already, the info does not come this time from our mole deep in Texas. It is from an NDA'd presentation towards the end of last year. According to the document, Compaq thinks Alpha still has 19 years of life left in it, and at the end of last year, 12,177 apps were available on the platform, compared to 3,864 on OpenVMS. The Alpha platform is a key component of Microsoft's alliance with Compaq and "bug free", the company claims. It states that the EV8 will arrive in the year 2002 and the EV9 in the year 2005. EV7 goals include large cache on chip, a built in memory controller, lock stepping to replace the Tandem architecture, four thread symmetric multiprocessing, and Rambus technology, while EV8 will have twice the performance of Intel's McKinley architecture, claims Compaq. The Alpha systems will be marketed as an Open Standard system, via Established Channels and branded as Alpha Powered from Compaq. According to the source, Microsoft has licensed "key parts" of the OpenVMS kernel to be used in future versions of Window NT, and many OpenVMS features will only be supported on the Alpha version. Tru64 and Tandem NonStop UX will be merged. The Vatican (!) uses Tru64 Unix, while Red China has said that it will be the number one Chinese Unix. Windows NT 7 will be "very similar" to OpenVMS V7. Floating point apps on WinNT run three times faster than on Intel IA-64 chips. Support for 32-64 SMP systems is currently being written. The Intel run-time environment FX!32 is included in the NT kernel so Intel native exe files will run on Alpha. Ten-way Oracle systems will be available in the year 2000, and the year after that, 10-way Informix systems. Err...that's it. ®