Rob - Re: "<Merced will have a major impact, just not in the PC market> What operating system will this impact be running?"
IBM ALREADY has Merced/ITANIUM running IBM's version of 64 bit Unix - Monterey !!!
Here's one of the REPORTS that IBM was so proud to issue !
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infoworld.com
IBM's Monterey claims success with Merced
By Ed Scannell and Mike Lattig
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 4:52 PM PT, Sep 16, 1999
While Intel's IA-64 chip is still a year away from being a commercial reality, IBM and other members of the Monterey/64 consortium will ignite the operating systems wars for the chip when they announce Friday they have an early version of their operating system working on the chip.
IBM successfully booted a Merced-based IA-64 system running Monterey/64 this past Monday at an Intel lab in Dupont, Wash. and did so without the use of a software emulator, according to company officials. Consortium officials claim this marks the first time a Unix operating system is up and running on the long-awaited 64-bit chip.
Officials from companies in the consortium, which include IBM, Intel, Sequent, Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), and others were quick to give themselves credit for the milestone, which IBM officials said took them less than 24 hours to achieve.
"We think getting Monterey/64 up and running on Intel hardware in such a short period of time is an extraordinary achievement," Rajiv Samant, general manager of the Unix brand at IBM, said in a prepared statement. "With this milestone, we have overtaken Sun [and] HP (Hewlett-Packard)."
Members of the Monterey project were quick to dismiss the announcement made by Sun two weeks ago that it had a version of its Solaris operating system up on the IA-64 chip. Officials cited Sun's use of a software emulator in order to boot the system successfully.
At last month's Linux World show in San Francisco, Intel chairman Andy Grove made a surprise appearance and gave the first demonstration, although brief, of the IA-64 processor running the kernel of an upcoming variant of Linux, code-named the Trillian Project. That demonstration also was made possible with the aid of a software emulator
The Trillian Project is led by V.A. Linux Research, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, SGI, and Cygnus.
Just three weeks ago, at the company's developer forum in Palm Springs, Calif., Intel President Craig Barrett oversaw the first demonstration of an actual IA-64 chip, running 64-bit Windows 2000.
Barrett said the company was working on delivering engineering samples to its OEM partners so they could start moving their operating systems from simulators to the real hardware. Barrett also noted at the forum that Monterey/64 and HP-UX as two operating systems the company would specifically target.
Members of the Monterey/64 project believe the milestone will inspire higher interest among software developers and OEMs to produce critical and fully exploitive products for not only the IA-64 but existing Unix-based platforms.
"We will now see an acceleration in 64-bit hardware design and development, as well as more ISVs actively porting to UnixWare 7 on IA-32 and AIX on Power platforms as they get ready for Monterey/64," said Mike Orr, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at SCO.
IBM Corp., in Armonk, N.Y., is at www.ibm.com. Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., is at www.intel.com.
Ed Scannell is an InfoWorld editor at large. Michael Lattig is an InfoWorld reporter
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Paul
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