Dale, Re: "If Intel can't move to a proprietary system and enforce its intellectual property then
Intel will suffer the same fate as the DRAM and DD makers."
No way Jose. Microprocessor chip designs nowadays, like Merced, are as complex as mainframes. Whether Merced is VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) or EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing), (oh, Intel page says EPIC), reverse engineering Merced successfully by another semiconductor company will be about as easy as making a T-Rex from a 70 million year old piece of amber. Well, maybe not quite.
If microprocessor architectures up to now have not been complex enough, when you throw in multiple pipelines, multiple instructions executable per cycle, out of order execution, branch predication, memory fetch speculation, etc., you get a machine that requires years in the making and a cast of thousands, literally. No Merced schedule slip jokes, please.
As if CPU hardware and microcode design were not bad enough, when you throw in the complexity of the work of the other disciplines that get involved in microprocessor development, such as architecture, system performance prediction, simulation, both functional and at speed, diagnostics, I/O, RAS, all the technology stuff with the sub microns, etc., and finally, design verification and test while running Windows NT, HP-PA..., Solaris, SCO UNIX and whomever else decides to try to be able to run on Merced...
I hope you get the idea. I also take it back about comparisons with mainframe design. Merced is harder, because everything is being changed at once: architecture and design, operating systems and technology (0.18?). With mainframes, only one thing is typically changed at a time (either architecture or technology) and the software is stable!
Tony |
