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Intel Announces Fund For Merced Processor Development
Posted by Craig "Mako" Campanaro : May 10th
Intel announced today the existence of an investment fund specifically dedicated towards the rapid development and release of their mid-2000 bound IA-64 Merced family of 64-bit processors. They also revealed that the new architecture will not initially utilize RDRAM.
The fund, valued at over 250 million dollars, includes both financial and technological investments from Dell, Compaq, SGI, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, and Intel themselves, is dedicated towards the goal of cultivating and implementing software solutions for the IA-64 architecture in mid-2000.
"This cross-industry effort will accelerate the development of complete software solutions for future IA-64 architecture-based high-end servers and workstations," said John Miner, vice president and general manager, Intel's Enterprise Server Group. "The Intel 64 Fund represents input and investment from an industry cross-section, which will help focus the development of next-generation e-commerce and Internet solutions. The fund will address the needs of an IT community actively preparing for IA-64-based platforms beginning with Merced in mid 2000."
Other points of interest during the press conference included the statements by Intel's John Miner that engineering samples of the Merced processor will ship in as little as "two months from now" as well as that the entire Merced package (Processor, Operating System and Mainboard Technology) being on track for a mid-2000 release.
In addition to the announcement of the fund, John surprisingly stated that Merced's architecture will actually utilize normal SDRAM at the time of its launch instead of the much written about Intel RAMBUS technology:
"Servers will follow desktops in the conversion to RDRAM technology".
There was no time frame estimate given as to when that conversion will take place. The IA-64 Merced family of products will be available in high-end enterprise servers in June of 2000.
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