Digital (Was RE: Mac "Workgroup Server" (or "network server") hardware & AIX)

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 27, 2016, at 3:47 AM, Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> Digital is now a fond memory for most. Both VAX and Alpha are no longer manufactured.
> 
> I actually wonder if an FPGA VAX chip could be made that would run faster than existing real VAXEN. That could perhaps form the basis of a nice VaxStation...

Clearly that's possible given that today's clock speeds are much higher than those of any VAX, and you could put caches on-chip as well for additional points.  The difficulty would be to create an accurate enough implementation.  Given the availability of the VAX architecture manual, the odds are better than they would be for many other processors.

For that matter, by the same reasoning it should be doable (and quite possibly easier) to build an FPGA Alpha.  Is the Alpha architecture manual ("SRM") online?

	paul