OT - Intel, HWP
The only RISC vendor left is SUN, MIPS is dead, HP is giving up, PowerPC failed and Alpha is being kept on life support by Compaq.
Well, Sun still has a very good chip with a good roadmap. They have already announced support for Merced, as has SGI. HP certainly hasn't given up, they designed Merced. I'm interested what Sun (Tzu) thinks about that, since Merced is both Risc and VLIW. It is a PA-RISC core which does X86 translation on the fly. Thus, it will run native HP-UX or X86 code (theoretically) without a recompile.
Way back in '95 when they told us HP and Intel would be working together on a future part we all thought, "Yeah right, two companies that big never succeed in joint projects". IBM/Apple/Pink, Motorola/Nortel/???, any others come to mind? HP took a low profile, back seat position on Merced, let Intel make all the announcements and the project has steadily proceeded toward production. Amazing.
It's amazing to think that Solaris, Linux, Windows, NT, HP-UX, and Irix may soon all be running on the same hardware and have the potential for binary compatibility. Incredible! Especially on the Unix side. |
