First silicon of the Alpha 21164 was produced in February 1994, and the OpenVMS, Digital UNIX and Windows NT operating systems were successfully booted on it.
The 21164 continued the performance lead from the 275 MHz Alpha 21064A until the introduction of the Intel Pentium Pro in November 1995, when a 200 MHz version outperformed the 300 MHz 21164 on the SPECint95_base benchmark suite.