[jandrese]

My impression is that Alpha's ISA was mostly fine except for the power draw, DEC just didn't have the R&D budget to keep up with Intel and all of the foundries and had their lunch eaten by x86 just like every other chip designer in the 80s and 90s.

[ncmncm]

Alpha was astonishing when it came out. It ran x86 code in emulation faster than any real x86 could go. Its only serious flaw was its chaotic memory bus operation ordering, which came to matter when you had two or more of them. Alpha died because DEC died, not the reverse.