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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (100262)	3/27/2000 3:25:00 PM
From: Rob Young	Respond to of 1577183

This is an easy one... The TWO biggest problems for Merced will be: Performance AND Price/Performance The former because 1.4 GHz Willamette will be there when 700 MHz Itanium goes production (not to mention 1.2 GHz Athlon, on-chip L2). Secondly, and nearly as important is Price/Performance.. Itanium should cost as much or more than Xeon with 2MB cache, priced those lately? More than $2K each. If a 4 processor Willamette/Athlon server is very near Itanium in performance, it would be -silly- to go for Itanium as the Willamette box will run IA32 far faster. The 1 year slippage is a big issue for Itanium. Linley Gwennap projects 4 processor Itaniums to do 45K , 4 processor Intel boxes do 27K today, wouldn't be that hard to believe a near doubling of clock speed and improved chipsets will double that number by year-end. Yep, Itanium ... all dressed up and no place to go. Rob

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (100262)	3/28/2000 12:13:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577183

McMannis - Re: "What do you see as the biggest problem with Merced...?" Software. Merced will need a rock-solid Operating system - or 2 or 3 - and these take a long time to test, debug, re-test, release and make in-system evaluation and correction. Next, applications software is critical to provide a necessary "reason" for customers to specify, purchase, install and support a Merced/ITanium system. These are on-going now, and have been on-going in hardware since FIRST SILICON last fall - and for over a year prior to that using Intel's IA64 software simulators. By the way - in light of this, when the SLudgeHumper is released in 1 1/2 years, it will probably be 3 years behind Merced/IA 64 in overall 64-bit PRODUCT development. Paul