On the other hand, Alpha had an infamously weak memory ordering, and it dying means that we don't have to deal with that when writing software. Check Documentation/memory-barriers.txt on the Linux kernel for the gory details (recent versions are after the kernel was changed to make Alpha work somewhat more similar to other architectures; check that documentation file on older kernel versions for the full horror).
Yes, I'm familiar with the woes of the particularly weak memory model. It's mostly a problem when writing lockfree data structures, as mutex acquisition and release executed the necessary fence instructions to maintain proper happens-before relations.
