According to Compaq India business manager (Alpha & Himalaya servers) Anil Valluri, "The adoption of 64-bit systems is slowly gaining momentum. The Merced delays have given us the opportunity to further establish Alpha as the 64-bit architecture," he said. Compaq which acquired Digital and Tandem recently also sees Alpha as a way to make it less dependent on Intel, he added.

The company also plans to extend the Alpha microprocessors to its high-end NonStop Himalaya systems. By combining the Alpha from Digital with Himalaya of Tandem, "Compaq will be able to deliver the world's most powerful chip running the most reliable, scalable single system," Velluri said.

The integration of Alpha in the Himalaya will not see any decline in the existing capabilities, he said. All the Himalaya features likereliability, scalability, manageability and data integrity will be preserved in the Alpha systems with superior processing power.

"Compaq decided on the Alpha for Himalaya as the existing MIPS chips from Silicon Graphics failed to have the desired computing capabilities. Added to this was the fact that even Silicon Graphics had announced its intention to migrate to the Merced platform at a later stage," Velluri said.

The first Himalaya product with the Alpha EV 7 chips will be unveiled in 2000 and presently the company will upgrade the existing Himalaya range with new versions of MIPS chip.

A major advantage of the new EV 7 series will be the Tandem lockstepping facility i.e. two processors checking each other which in turn will provide users with high levels of data integrity, he said.

The non-stop Himalaya systems are at present in use in almost all the major stock exchanges of the country barring a few like the NSE. A majority of the world's automatic teller machines, credit card transactions andtelecommunications are run on NonStop systems. In addition it is used in many industries to run large multi-terabyte decision support solutions (DSS).