Dale & Intel Investors - SGI & Unisys line up Behind MERCED
Add two more OEM's to commit future machines to Intel's Merced processor. These commitments were announced at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose.
Intel must be doing A LOT MORE than blowing smoke to get all these comoanies to commit to the Merced.
Did anybody see/hear commitments or endorsements of AMD's K7?
Paul
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news.com
SGI, Unisys to use Merced
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 14, 1998, 1:15 p.m. PT
Silicon Graphics and Unisys have thrown
their weight behind Intel's IA-64 architecture,
detailing plans today for rolling out the new
64-bit chip in high-powered machines.
The two corporate computer companies
announced new systems that will take
advantage of Intel's first chip using the IA-64
architecture, code-named Merced.
Early in the year
2000, Silicon
Graphics (SGI) plans
to release a
high-performance
computer based on
its ccNUMA
architecture that can
tackle technical tasks
by performing up to 1
trillion mathematical
calculations a
second.
And Unisys announced plans for large
corporate servers that initially will be able to
use both Intel's Pentium II Xeon and Merced
chips.
The first versions of SGI's system will be
based on MIPS processors, but users will be
able to swap out modules to put in IA-64
processors.
The systems are designed for customers
performing intense computations, such as
engineers modeling airplane designs or
financial analysts simulating the global
economy, said Ben Passarelli, product
manager for high-end servers at Silicon
Graphics.
The first systems based on Merced
processors will be available in mid- to late
2000, SGI spokeswoman Ginny Babbitt said.
Merced's successor, McKinley, will be used
starting in early 2001. Meanwhile, SGI will
continue selling systems based on the MIPS
chip during an overlap period.
"The board-swap strategy is very positive,"
said Chris Willard, a research director at
International Data Corporation. By being
able to switch out MIPS processor boards
with IA-64 processor boards, a customer still
can keep the same input-output system and
other computing infrastructures.
However, changing processors means that
software has to change too, and that's a part
of the transition that customers won't
overlook.
"Lots of companies, including Silicon
Graphics, have indicated that their future
road map is to move to IA-64. The winners in
this business are the ones that can address
those conversion issues in a way that will be
least painful to the actual buyers making the
transitions," Willard said.
Passarelli said he expects two phases in the
transition.
First, the early adopters who desire the
fastest new systems will quickly buy the new
Merced systems and begin porting their
software to the new platform. Later, the more
conservative customers--financial
companies, for example--will wait until the
operating system and software have been
recompiled and tested for the new IA-64
platform.
That delay means a lot of customers will be
interested in the new Silicon Graphics
machines about the same time they'll be
equipped with the McKinley chip, which is
expected to ship about 18 months after
Merced, Passarelli said.
Partly for the benefit of these more cautious
organizations, Silicon Graphics will sell
systems with the MIPS chip at least through
the introduction of McKinley, Passarelli said.
The IA-64 architecture is good for Silicon
Graphics' technical computing requirements
because they can communicate with memory
faster than existing chips and have more
on-chip storage space devoted to
performing floating-point calculations,
Passarelli said. IA-64 makes it easier to
keep the processor fed with data and
calculating instead of waiting for the next
data to come in.
The new systems, which use the SGI's
ccNUMA architecture, will be available with
as few as four processors and as many as
512, said Ben Passarelli, product line
manager for high-end servers at SGI. The
processors come packaged on modules that
include memory and between one and four
processors.
The ccNUMA architecture allows lots of
processors to tackle computing tasks without
getting bogged down with processors
keeping track of the status of all the other
processors. Passarelli said ccNUMA lets
Silicon Graphics sell systems that can be
expanded by adding more and more
processors.
IA-64 also will be the foundation of Unisys's
next generation of high-performance
corporate enterprise servers.
Although the first such systems will ship with
today's Xeon chips, users will be able to add
Merced processors within the same system.
Unisys will use an architecture called Cellular
MultiProcessing to tie together the
components of its multiprocessor systems.
The first systems based on that architecture
are scheduled to ship in 1999. They will have
a "shared-everything" design, so that each
processor in the system gets access to as
much as 64GB of memory and 96 PCI ports.
The Unisys computers are designed for
companies needing to run business-critical
"data center" tasks requiring uninterrupted
availability, security, high-volume
communications, and the ability to add new
processors.
Intel is an investor in CNET: The Computer
Network, publisher of News.com.
Related news stories
• SGI adds hardware guarantee September 30, 1998
• Unisys has next-gen mainframes June 8, 1998
• Unisys pushes NT envelope May 13, 1998
• SGI cozies up to Intel, plans cuts April 14, 1998
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