Tony & Intel Investors - Intel's Position on Merced - a PRODUCTION CPU
"Let me go on record. Ron Curry of Intel said Merced is a not a development vehicle. Merced is a product vehicle."
Paul
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Intel executives insist Merced will be volume product
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Story posted 1:30 p.m. EST/10:30 a.m., PST, 9/1/99
By Mark Hachman
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- Is Intel Corp.'s Merced just a development platform? Absolutely not, insisted company executives during the Intel Developer Forum here this week.
In fact, Ron Curry, director of marketing for Intel's Microprocessor Products Group, claimed that the total number of Merced chips sampling next year will outstrip the production of all devices manufactured by rivals for the RISC-based processor market. The production version of Merced will also surpass, or at least be "pretty competitive" with the market's best-selling RISC chips, Curry added.
At a lunch with reporters at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday, company executives went on the offensive and attempted to counter the impression that Merced is merely marking time while its successor, McKinley, is in development. Curry claimed media reports that fostered a negative image of Merced have no basis in fact, nor were they backed up by actual OEM feedback.
Curry claimed 30 Merced-based products will be introduced next year, when the first systems to use the high-end CPU are slated to hit the street-although he did not say how many OEMs will ship those systems.
"Why invest billions of dollars in a test vehicle?" he asked. "Let me go on record. Ron Curry of Intel said Merced is a not a development vehicle. Merced is a product vehicle."
Intel president and CEO Craig R. Barrett said his company had begun to ship its first prototype engineering samples to OEMs, and demonstrated numerous applications running on Merced silicon (see Aug. 31 story). Intel representatives declined to comment on the speed of the chip, but Curry said Merced was running "on preproduction silicon, and at preproduction speed."
While it is impossible to judge how OEMs will treat Merced next year, system makers like Hewlett-Packard Co. have announced plans to ship Merced-based systems. According to Curry, NEC Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. will ship separate Merced-based systems using custom chipsets that allow eight and 16 microprocessors to be used in parallel. Silicon Graphics Inc. plans to build a 512-way Merced implementation, he added. In comparison, Intel's own 460GX chipset is only able to support four Merced processors in a system.
Curry declined to reveal the Merced's final performance specifications or clock speed. He did say, however, that the chip will process 6 gigaflops (6 billion single-precision floating point operations per second), or 3 Gflops when processing double-precision floating-point calculations.
Recently, HP executives said that in simulation tests the net integer performance of the first Merced chip was 90% of the company's 440-MHz PA-RISC 8500, and achieved 85% of the 8500's ability to calculate floating-point operations. The tests were conducted to eliminate factors such as bus speed, using software that isolated the CPU's performance.
Curry said the Merced will be competitive with the latest PA-RISC, is faster than Sun Microsystems Inc.'s UltraSparc-III, and will outperform the 64-bit Alpha chip marketed by Alpha Processor Inc. |
