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Robert, I was careful to note Merced and it's follow-on program by which I was indicating McKinley. Robert, the Mac bias news/comments sites are for the most part very bad when discussing chip tech incl PPC programs. I would rely more on things like EE times, etc. All the major Risc players are onboard the HWP-Intel EPIC program and I think it would be foolish to take a strong bet against it's future success. As for emulation, Robert, last I looked no one had definitive knowledge as to how the HWP-Intel EPIC program was going to tackle that. Since Merced is a very expensive chip meant to go into $15K systems and up it's been surmised that backward compatibility would be assured by an X86 chip onboard. Relatively speaking it would add very little to the cost of these expensive systems. I stand by my previous comments that IBM is likely going to develop both it's 64 bit PPC program and the EPIC program. If the EPIC program offers better performance and overhead, I think you will see the EPIC program gaining the majority of IBMs 64 bit resources. The same is true for the other RISC boxmakers, SUN, SGI, Siemans, CPQ, Etc. |
