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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (56255)	4/26/1999 1:04:00 AM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570341

Rob - Re: "Can't out-muscle an 8500 in a late 2000 timeframe? " The PA-RISC-8500 ? You must mean the PA-RISC 8500 that Intel is building for Hewlett Packard. Intel makes a tidy profit on each one of those, you know ! --- --- Yes.. I am aware Intel manufactures those.. probably a proof of concept part for Merced as they will be very close in size. But still, this is legitimately disturbing Merced news: techweb.com Hewlett-Packard, co-developer of Intel's IA-64 architecture, has hinted the company may not use the Merced chip in its first IA-64 ready server, the N-4000. The Palo Alto, Calif., company suggested it might wait instead for Intel's McKinley chip, alater increment of the IA-64, and continue using its own PA-RISC design in the interim. "The original idea was to target on Merced. Now they [the Unix division] are looking at whether McKinley would make better sense. It would offer better price/performance," said Hugh Jenkins, HP's enterprise product marketing manager. -------- What can that be about? Why now? You would think at the very least Intel's partner on all this would be toeing the company line and if nothing else keep quiet regarding all the "whys and wherefores" concerning Merced usage. Everyone else comes along and FUDs up Merced to no end and now this. Maybe I am reading too much into that.. but let's focus on one statement: "[Wait til McKinley,] it would offer better price/performance" Clever. Didn't directly say Merced's price/performance sucks. But in a modestly large server (8 processor N-4000) CPUs (as we know) add very little to the overall cost of the platform. Intel would sell the suckers at cost if they could jump start the market. And surely HP would get a deep discount. My conclusion is that Merced's performance sucks, never mind its cost. Maybe Merced's performance does suck compared to an 8500 or 8600 by the time Merced arrives. By the way, I think the 8600 is little more than a process shrink and speed bump of the 8500. Maybe it will hit 40 SpecInt95. One other good FUD angle here, where is the mention of Merced NT for the N-4000? Surely Win64 for Merced will be ready by the time Merced arrives, won't it? You would think that HP will be quick to point that out.. maybe we will see some progress statements on Win64 for Merced. Come to think of it I have seen Win64 progress statements for Merced. Seems Win64 isn't going well at all for Merced. Linux is though, going real well on the enemalator. Rob