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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems

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To: QwikSand who wrote (27085)	2/1/2000 10:37:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) of 64865

QS - Isn't McKinley just Merced taking advantage of a smaller process? They may have changed the layout but the basic processor and compiler design is still the same, no? No. McKinley has many architectural differences which are intended to overcome problems which became apparent early in the Merced design. It also has a different bus structure... Merced made assumptions about how well compilers would be able to exploit the VLIW architecture which did not prove out, and so McKinley uses more real estate to provide performance even when the compiler has not done a perfect job... McKinley is therefore not anything like a compatible replacement for Merced and even if Intel brought the chip schedule up, the rest of the pieces (including systems designs to actually support the architecture, compilers and other tools, and of course OS support) could probably not be advanced much. Your statement is more or less true at the application layer, but that is more a question of developing stacks that are 64-bit aware rather than IA64 specific. My impression is that Intel is actually going the other way. A year ago, Merced was being positioned as a "development platform" and most OEMs were looking to do relatively small designs to support that development. But over the year, Intel has shifted their emphasis to use of Merced as an actual platform... this signals to me that McKinley may be farther out rather than sooner.

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