Compaq announced complete switchover to Itanium and killing off Alpha without any warning (No Itanium chips were available then, iirc), which is how there are Windows 2000 RCs for Alpha - up until the announcement the development was progressing with assumption that Alpha would be launch platform for 2000 just like it was for NT4.
Also, a lot of AMD64 tech is Alpha derived, despite Intel buying a lot of it from Compaq. I once heard a rumour that early K8 design changelog supposedly had a line about "dropping VAX floating point support from the FPU". Which would be less believable if Hammer didn't resemble EV7 with DDR2 in place of Rambus and no ethernet-based management bus.
Also, a lot of AMD64 tech is Alpha derived, despite Intel buying a lot of it from Compaq. I once heard a rumour that early K8 design changelog supposedly had a line about "dropping VAX floating point support from the FPU". Which would be less believable if Hammer didn't resemble EV7 with DDR2 in place of Rambus and no ethernet-based management bus.