The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

Digital Equipment's Alpha 21264 is a 64-bit processor available in 1998 that offers significantly faster performance than Intel's x86 architecture, particularly for floating-point and math-intensive tasks, and is expected to reach 1GHz speeds by 2000—potentially outperforming Intel's upcoming Merced processor. The Alpha represents the last RISC architecture for which Microsoft is developing future versions of Windows NT, as the company phases out support for other RISC platforms like MIPS and PowerPC while focusing on Intel's x86 and the new IA-64 architecture.