Electro What?

A popular myth that explains how Alpha chips got the nickname EV describes how engineers decided during lunch one day to excite a pickle to the frequencies at which Alpha chips run. The engineers plugged the pickle in to a pair of electrodes. The pickle glowed green, and from then on Alphas had the nickname Electro Vlasic, or EV for short.

Unfortunately, the truth isn't so amusing. Digital's original plan
for the Alpha processor, even before it had the name Alpha, was to replace the company's venerable CISC architecture, the VAX. Digital planned to provide an extension to the VAX family that would carry the product line into the next century. Some Digital employees took advantage of this opportunity to create a processor with no historical baggage or hardware emulation, and after the project was partially finished, Digital scrapped the Extended VAX (EV) plan and began to design a new chip. The only portions of the original project that the new chip retained are VAX floating-point compatibility (which is available in addition to the standard Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers--IEEE--floating-point format) and the EV designation.

The first number that follows EV in Alpha chips' designations identifies the processors' generation. (I haven't heard Digital's solution to the nomenclature of processors beyond the Alpha's ninth generation.) If a second digit appears after EV in a processor's name, it denotes that the chip has a more advanced process technology than the first chip of that Alpha generation. Table A shows the Alpha's processor designs and corresponding process technologies.