Alpha is both a high-speed processor and a computer system developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and now produced by Compaq Computer Corporation. The Alpha processor is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer,) which has a small set of simple instructions, rather than a large set of complex instructions. This has the advantage of much higher processor speeds, because the processor is much simpler and smaller. The tradeoff is that some of the work that would otherwise be done by the processor now has to be done by software.