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To: Pigboy who wrote (83108)	6/9/1999 3:32:00 AM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 186894

Pigboy, article...Merced's advantage? Multitasking... June 9, 1999 ComputerWorld : Intel Corp. confirmed that although virtually all existing Pentium-based applications and operating systems will run on Merced systems, performance for that software will be approximately the same as on a Pentium III. And Hewlett-Packard Co. said applications written for its own PA-RISC-based servers will be executed on Merced using software emulation, though the company insisted performance will be comparable to native PA-RISC. Then what's Merced's advantage? In a word,multitasking. Merced's IA-64 architecture includes eight times as many registers as a Pentium. That lets Merced quickly switch among tasks without having to save the register set's contents for one task to memory and reload the registers for another task -- a time-consuming process known as "spill and fill." The large register set and new parallel-execution features also allow much faster performance of complex floating-point calculations. The result: For applications tuned to use the new features, Merced should dramatically improve performance. But for conventional Pentium-based applications, those extra registers will sit unused -- and useless. Other key Merced features include the following: n DOS, NetWare and Windows 3.x, 9x and NT will run unmodified as long as the computer's firmware (BIOS or boot ROM) initially configures the CPU for Pentium compatibility. n Microsoft said it will have a Merced-specific version of Windows NT ready when Merced-based servers ship next year. n Hewlett-Packard HP-UX applications compiled for HP's PA-RISC CPU will run under software emulation only. Intel and HP claim performance is comparable to native PA-RISC. n Other expected operating systems support includes Sun Solaris, Digital Unix and The Santa Cruz Operation Inc.'s Unix. Intel claimed Merced will perform 6 gigaflops (one billion floating-point operations per second), about three times the speed of the current Pentium III floating-point performance, in IA-64 mode. When running Pentium-compatible applications, Intel said, performance will be equivalent to a Pentium III. -- Frank Hayes <<ComputerWorld