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To: maui_dude who wrote (86226)	8/2/2002 1:51:07 AM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Maui, Re: Itanium Schedule Maui, it looks like Dan3's claim is that Itanium was 5 years late to market. I decided to look this up to provide you with the facts that you were looking for. After doing several Internet searches, and a search of Intel's web page, I found the earliest press release giving a 64-bit processor launch date to be this one here. intel.com It was released on October 9, 1997, and it seems to have been the first announcement to actually give a date. According to the article, Intel expected this processor to go into production in 1999. Since it didn't hit the market until 2001, that makes the processor two years late. I also found this story, which is a little earlier, dated September 19, 1996. While this article mentions Merced, it does not give an exact date, but only mentions that the processor would be "in volume during the next few years". intel.com If you're interested in a press release timeline, you can find them all right here. I will try to summarize the sequence of events. intel.com As I see it, the efforts towards a new and highly parallelized instruction set may have been started by HP in the early 1990's, but the first time I had ever heard of an Intel alliance was in the Fall of 1996 (I remember exactly when a colleague of mine first mentioned it to me). Given the sequence of press releases and external information, I believe that Intel and HP began architectural work on Merced shortly after Intel launched the Pentium Pro in 1995. IA-64 was originally going to be codenamed the "P7" for being Intel's 7th generation microprocessor. By late 1997 when they made the first press release giving a date, Intel must have been partially through with design, and no doubt had an internal goal of reaching first tapeout in mid-1998 (given historical timelines, this would have allowed the mid-1999 product launch). The first sign that Intel was running late with Merced was this press release, which announced Merced's first boot and power-on on August 31, 1999. intel.com At this point, we can either assume that tapeout was delayed, or that power-on was delayed due to an incomplete version of Windows 64-bit. Either way, one could expect a best-case launch in early 2000, since typical design cycles can get a product to market in less than a year from first power-on. Of course, the real delay was the year and 9 months that it took from power-on to actually get the product to market (about 1 year longer than it should have taken, IMO). Here is the actual launch press release, dated May 29, 2001. intel.com So given the one year delay in getting first power-on, plus the one year delay going from power-on to production, Merced's total slip to market was two years, as I explained above. AMD's Hammer has also gone through a number of delays, slipping production from late 2001, all the way to early 2003 (a 1 year, 3 month slip). If AMD launches Hammer without any more delays, they will have only beaten the Merced schedule by about 9 months. I hope that the facts that I have provided help to clear up the confusion that you were having. wbmw