Barry - Re: "I really like the way you think."
Thanks for the compliment.
Re: "What would be your conjecture on the minimum number of Merced chips that will be linked together in an Intel based mainframe? What might be the ASP of the initial Merced's in 1999?"
I would guess that the minimum number Merced Chips in a high performance server system will be at least 4 and possibly 8. Intel has indicated that the MERCED will support UP TO 256 in a parallel mode, but I'm not sure if special chip sets will be required for large numbers of Merceds.
Intel has already demonstrated that 4-way SMP hardware support on the Pentium Pro and Deschutes was a slam dunk. However, 8-way fail over clusters seem to be "popular" which essentially has two identical 4-way SMP machines working as if they were one, and either group will take over full operation if the other group goes down (fail-over).
Over time, as the software is developed to take advantage of more MERCEDs, I would guess 16 and 64-way systems should begin to appear - probably around 2001/2002.
As for price, Intel sent the Pentium II 300 MHz out of the barn at an initial price of $1900 +/-, so I would bet that sets a FLOOR under the MERCED pricing.
Now, here's a wild guess. The original 8080 was priced (arbitrarily) at $360 by Intel in 1974, sort of as a joke at IBM, indicating IBM's 360 mainframe (actually, they were 390s by the early 70s).
So, I will predict that the first MERCED will carry a price tag of $3600!
Remember - these will contain about 22,000,000 transistors and be built on a 0.18 micron process technology and run at 500 MHz or better. They won't be cheap for quite a while!
Paul |
