Intel details 64-bit Merced plans By Ephraim Schwartz InfoWorld Electric Posted at 2:19 PM PT, Feb 23, 1999 PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- Intel announced this week at its Professional Developer Conference here that it will ship manufacturing samples of its 64-bit Merced processor by midyear and that the processor will be in production in mid-2000. The company also announced that it has successfully booted seven different operating systems on the Merced simulator, including Microsoft's 64-bit Windows OS. Other operating systems booted include Sun's Solaris, SCO UnixWare Monterey, Novell's Modesto, HP-UX, plus full support for Linux. By 2001, Intel 64-bit processors should be performing at 1,000 MHz, or 1 GHz. On stage at the Conference, the company actually demonstrated 1-GHz performance using a Pentium III processor. However, brute megahertz alone may not put the Intel processor at the top of the performance heap. "To get performance out of the EPIC [Intel's Explicit Parallel Instruction Computing] architecture, the software has to be optimized to use it," said Nathan Brookwood, chief analyst at Insight 64, in Saratoga, Calif. "To do that is a very challenging compiling task. That's where performance will come from, and it is not clear Intel has done that yet." The Merced chip along with the 64-bit Windows OS will be able to address at least 4 terabytes of memory, and will have a 128-bit wide system bus, according to an Intel representative. The follow-on 64-bit chip to the Merced is called McKinley, and it is actually this chip that will run in excess of 1 GHz and have three times as much bandwidth as the Merced. Samples of McKinley are slated to ship in late 2000, and production quality parts in late 2001. According to Intel officials, the processor will help OS vendors create high-availability features for enhanced error handling support and monitoring, which will result in downtime measured in minutes per year. Systems will include four eight-way clusters on introduction with the chip scaling as high as 512 ways, and they will include three levels of memory caching, according to Hemant Dhulla, IA-64 programs manager at Intel. However, according to Brookwood, other chip manufacturers, including Compaq/Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems, are not standing still, and it will still be a race to see whether Merced will outperform RISC processors. "For IA 64 to have an impact on the industry, Intel will have to demonstrate superior value and performance, and they haven't shown that yet," Brookwood said. Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., can be reached at www.intel.com. InfoWorld Editor at Large Ephraim Schwartz is based in San Francisco. From MAILER-DAEMON@cs.depaul.edu Wed Feb 24 10:14:31 1999