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Digital's AXPvme and Alpha VME boards are 6U VMEbus single-board computers sold for embedded and realtime work rather than as general purpose machines. The first series, AXPvme, was built around the 21066A, which Digital introduced on 14 November 1994 as "the heart of Digital's AXPvme series of VMEbus single-board computers (SBCs)", for control systems in military and industrial realtime applications; the boards also ran VxWorks for Alpha. ¹⁾ Members of that series include the AXPvme 160, 166, and 230. ²⁾

Later boards moved to faster processors and dropped the AXPvme name. The Digital Alpha VME 4/224 and 4/288 use the 21064A, ³⁾ and an Alpha VME 5/480 identifies itself to Digital UNIX as a 21164A at 480 MHz with the 21172 chipset, 2 MiB of external cache, and the VMEbus system controller on PCI. ⁴⁾

Digital announced the 4/224 and 4/288 on 24 April 1996 for "industrial automation, military defense and communications", claiming double the CPU performance of the AXPvme 230 and four times the memory bandwidth of the 21066 based boards. The CPU design used "the same core logic found in Digital's AlphaServer 1000 system", and PCI carried the on-board SCSI, Ethernet, and VME interfaces. Digital offered Digital UNIX and VxWorks for Alpha for them. ⁵⁾

Digital also sold the Alpha VME 2100, an AlphaServer 2100 in 19-inch rackmount packaging with VME64 in place of EISA, announced in October 1994 as the AlphaServer 2100 4/190 VME. ^{6) 7)}

• 6U VMEbus module built on the LCA processor family, with integrated memory and PCI controllers ⁸⁾
• 8 to 128 MiB of DRAM, with a 256 KiB (AXPvme 64, 64LC, and 160) or 512 KiB (AXPvme 100, 166, and 230) backup cache
• Full master and slave VME interface, built on the Cypress VIC64, able to act as VME system controller
• DECchip 21040 Ethernet, NCR 53C810 SCSI, and 85C30 serial lines on PCI

• 21064A at 224 MHz with 512 KiB of cache, or at 288 MHz with 2 MiB of cache, with a DECchip 21071-DA PCI host bridge ⁹⁾
• 8 to 128 MiB of ECC memory on DIMMs
• VME64 interface built on the Cypress VIC64, capable of DMA transfers
• DECchip 21040 Ethernet, NCR 53C810 SCSI, two DEC423 serial ports, and one double-width or two single-width PCI mezzanine cards, in a two board set occupying two adjacent 6U VME slots

The boards run the SRM console. Beyond the usual environment variables, it has VME_A32_BASE, VME_A32_SIZE, VME_A24_BASE, VME_A24_SIZE, VME_A16_BASE, and VME_CONFIG for the VMEbus windows, and VX_BOOTLINE for the VxWorks bootstrap. ¹⁰⁾ During power-on self-test the SROM counts down from 8 to 1 on the status display and stops at the number of a failing test. ¹¹⁾

Unlike the evaluation boards, the VME boards had their firmware published on Digital's Alpha firmware CD-ROM and gatekeeper.dec.com, in axpvme and alphavme directories. ^{12) 13) 14)}

The SMMTABLE.TXT file on the V7.3 firmware CD lists SRM 1.3 as the last version for the Alpha VME 4/224 and 4/288 and names no update file for it (the entry is [ARCHIVE]NOFILE.EXE). ¹⁵⁾

Linux was never ported to these boards: no kernel platform for them exists. ¹⁶⁾ The Alpha VME 4 is supported by VxWorks for Alpha and by Digital UNIX. ¹⁷⁾ The AXPvme and Alpha VME boards are listed among the systems supported by Tru64 UNIX V4.0F (see Operating Systems).

• Breakout module compatibility: the Alpha VME 4 must be used with its own primary breakout module, part 54-24663-01. Powering the board with no primary breakout module installed, or with the breakout module from an AXPvme 160, 166, or 230 (part 54-22605-01), may damage the backplane, the board, or both. ¹⁸⁾
• Interrupts from user boards: a VMEbus interrupt that crashes the machine with an "invalid memory or i/o controller error" rather than reaching the handler can be caused by the backplane interrupt grant jumpers. ^{19) 20)}

Field replaceable units for the Alpha VME 4: ²¹⁾

An asterisk stands for any of A, Z, R, or X.