To ensure the leadership of Alpha architecture in the future Compaq and Samsung signed a memorandum in December 1999. Both parties agreed to invest the total of 500 mln USD in the architecture (Samsung had to invest 200 mln USD into the development and tuning of new technological processes, and Compaq was supposed to invest 300 mln USD into new server solutions design and further Tru64 UNIX development). Also, in the same month Compaq and IBM agreed that the latter would manufacture Alpha processors using copper compound technology of its own, when this technology was completed. At the same time, Samsung would still remain the primary supplier of Alpha processors. Summing up the annual results for Compaq, they could be best illustrated by price per share delta: the price fell from $51 in February to $28 in December. Though many analysts stated it could have been much worse.

Y2K was a quiet year for Compaq. Samsung failed to finalize its 0.18µ aluminum process. IBM, however, started supplying EV68C to Compaq in limited quantities, and the market had to be happy with considerably slow EV67 for a while. The development of 21364 was still in progress (EV7, also known as Marvel), though 21464 (EV8, also known as Araña) had already been mentioned in a few announcements. The collapse of dot-com businesses affected Compaq's shares, which price dropped down to $15 per share by December, i.e. by 44% since January. Could be strange, but that was a good result; other companies, more dependable upon e-commerce, lost much more: Gateway - 75%, Apple - 71%, Dell - 65%. Dot-coms themselves were either bankrupts, or close to that; Yahoo.com lost 95% of its market value, Priceline.com - 97%.

In the beginning of 2001, Samsung started to manufacture EV68A in mass quantity, but the right moment had passed by. Compaq planned to ship EV68C-based systems (GS-class AlphaServers), and to upgrade those already in production. EV7 was still somewhere, when something completely unexpected happened: on June 25, 2001 ("black Monday"), Compaq announced the complete shift of their server solutions from Alpha to IA-64 architecture by 2004. EV8 was cancelled immediately (though some details about its working principles were discussed during Microprocessor Forum in October 1999), and EV7 was scheduled to come out in the beginning of 2002 at the earliest. After that the Alpha Microprocessor Division had to be disbanded, and most of its employees had to move to Intel. Samsung and IBM stopped producing Alpha processors soon. Later, it was even more interesting: on September 3, 2001, Hewlett-Packard announced its intentions to acquire Compaq, which experienced some financial difficulties: its price-per-share value equaled $10 in December 2001. The deal was approved by shareholders' meetings of both corporations, also by governments of the USA and Canada, and closed in May 2002.

On October 21, 2001, API (renamed by that moment to API NetWorks) transferred all rights to support Alpha systems (including warranty service) to Microway, the largest [after Compaq] builder of Alpha workstations and servers, an old partner of former DEC. API itself left the Alpha products market, and concentrated its efforts on network technologies, development of HyperTransport bus, and data storage systems.

In conclusion I could say that though Compaq avoided many of those DEC’s mistakes, it still didn't unveil all power of the architecture. High-performance Alpha systems based on 21264A and 21264B didn't hit the sub-$2000 price category, and low-cost 21264PC never appeared at all. Low-cost mainboards on AMD Irongate never appeared in volume, and expensive DEC Tsunami, offered by Compaq for over $1000 per unit in OEM quantities, prevented Alpha systems from entering the mainstream market segment. Other AMD Athlon chipset manufacturers didn't adapt them for 21264, though VIA had such an intention initially.