Wednesday September 1 2:50 AM ET
Intel Shipping First Samples Of Merced
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (Reuters) - Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news)
said
Tuesday it had reached a major milestone in the development of
its
next generation processor, code-named Merced and it was shipping
engineering samples to computer makers for testing.
Merced is the first chip in a family designed around a new 64-bit
architecture, which Intel has been developing with Hewlett-Packard
Co. (NYSE:HWP - news) since 1994. A 64-bit chip architecture will
process data in chunks of
64 bits, versus the current standard 32-bit architecture.
``This is the very first Merced coming out of the manufacturing
line,'' said Gadi Singer, vice
president and general manager of Intel's IA-64 processor division,
as he conducted the first
public demonstration of the chip at the Intel Developer Forum here.
The demonstration represents a key manufacturing step, or ''first silicon'' for the chip.
Singer, who joined Intel president and chief executive Craig Barrett
on the stage,
demonstrated Merced running on an early version of Microsoft Corp.'s
(Nasdaq:MSFT - news)
Windows 2000 and on a next-generation version of the free Linux
operating system, both of
which are currently in development.
``We are looking at Merced as the new engine for e- business,'' Barrett said.
He showed data indicating that, as the Internet becomes more pervasive
for high bandwidth
intensive applications, such as video and audio, more and more
network servers would be
required.
``Ninety-six percent (of the servers needed are) yet to be deployed...The
growth of the
Internet is in our hands,'' he added.
Merced and its follow-on chips were initially designed to run in
high performance systems
such as engineering workstations and servers and were not expected
to be used in PCs until
after 2005, analysts said.
Barrett said the company was still on track for volume production
for Merced in mid-2000.
Company executives declined to say how many prototypes of the chip
they were shipping to
computer makers, or to identify which computer makers were receiving
the samples. The
companies were helping Intel with its testing and validation of
the chip, which would take
about nine to 12 months.
``It's good news,'' said Rick Doherty, director of Envisioneering,
a consulting firm in Seaford,
N.Y. ``The updated timetable will ease a lot of developers's concerns.''
Merced has already experienced one delay due to its massive engineering
effort. Originally,
Intel had said Merced would ship in volume at the end of 1999.
``It's a very significant milestone,'' said Stephen Smith, vice
president and general manager of
Intel's Santa Clara processor division.
Intel engineers said they orchestrated a major engineering feat
in demonstrating Merced in
front of a live audience of 2,500, mostly made up of their engineers
peers from other
companies. Previously, the operating systems had only been running
on a software simulation
of the chip.
In the past two weeks, since the first chips came off the manufacturing
line, a team of about
50 engineers had huddled together at an Intel facility in Dupont,
Wash., where they typically
worked 19-20 hour days, to get the software to run on the actual
chip. Intel transported the
big systems used in the laboratory, without the chassis covers,
to Palm Springs, on a
chartered aircraft.
``This is all lab equipment. It's not designed to move from the
lab,'' said Art Webb, a senior
hardware engineer at Intel.
The engineers took to calling their project 'The Merced Roadshow'
and during the keynote,
Intel showed a home-style video on 'The Merced Project', spoofing
the hit horror movie, 'The
Blair Witch Projet.'
Five other operating systems, including both H-P's and Sun Microsystems
Inc.'s
(Nasdaq:SUNW - news) versions of the UNIX operating system, are
also being developed to
run on Merced.
``I really think that Merced is a huge deal, because it introduces
a new price point for very
high performance computing,'' said Janet Ramkissoon, president
of Quadra Capital, an
investment fund, in New York. ``The symmetric multiprocessing capability
of Merced will
drive the Internet forward,'' she added, referring to its ability
to run multi-processors at the
same time.
Barrett also told the audience (and instructed his managers during
the keynote) that he was
moving up the release date of the company's next version of the
Pentium III, code-named
Coppermine, to October from the end of the year and said it would
be running at speeds of
700 megahertz. At that speed, Intel would surpass Advanced Micro
Devices Inc.'s (NYSE:AMD
- news) new Athlon chips, which were introduced just last month
at 600 and 650 megahertz.
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