It's a persistent misunderstanding that release-consume is about Alpha. It's not; in fact, Alpha is one of the few architectures where release-consume doesn't help.

In a TSO architecture like x86 or SPARC, every "regular" memory load/store is effectively a release/acquire by default. Using release/consume or relaxed provides no extra speedup on these architectures. In weak memory models, you need to add in acquire barriers to get release/acquire architectures. But also, most weak memory models have a basic rule that a data-dependent load has an implicit ordering dependency on the values that computed it (most notably, loading *p has an implicit dependency on p).

The goal of release/consume is to be able to avoid having an acquire fence if you have only those dependencies--to promote a hardware data dependency semantic rule to a language-level semantic rule. For Alpha's ultra-weak model, you still need the acquire fence in this mode, it doesn't help Alpha one whit. Unfortunately, for various reasons, no one has been able to work out a language-level semantics for consume that compilers are willing to implement (preserving data dependencies through optimizations is a lot more difficult than it appears), so all compilers have remapped consume to acquire, making it useless.