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SubjectRe: Merced makes things interesting, eh?
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Shawn Leas <sleas@ixion.honeywell.com> writes:

> A little excerpt from a writeup by Rebecca Sykes, InfoWorld Electric seems
> to say that when Merced comes out, a lot of big vendors will transition to
> this platform, abandoning their own chip archtrs.
>
> "It should lower the cost for Unix vendors who choose to go with Intel
> because they won't have to continue developing their own proprietary
> platform to run Unix on," McCabe said. For
> example, Hewlett-Packard, Merced's co-developer, has announced that it
> will transition users of its 64-bit Unix-based PA-RISC platform beginning
> in 1999, she said.
>
> Does this then mean that Linux (being technically superior in some
> respects to many major Un*xes) will be in an even better position to
> compete with big propriety OSes? I work with PH-UX (PHucking sUX), I
> would like to see something like linux instead of it.

I'm not sure why you would think this -- it's not going to be
particularly better or worse at direct competiton than before; it's just
that the "high-end" OSes will be running on hardware that is more similar
to "consumer" OSes than before. The "high-end" will lose some
competitiveness due to not having so much specially engineered hardware,
but I'd imagine they'll still have some (so that the vendors can
differentiate themselves, if nothing else).

[As a side note, HP will of course migrate to Merced -- they have helped
Intel in the development of the Merced all along.]

The reason that the high-end hardware vendors are moving towards
Merced (or the Alpha) -- as I see it, at least -- is to be more
competitive. This comes through amortizing the cost of chip development
over many units. Look at the original Crays -- their individual
processors were blindingly fast. As time progressed, supercomputers have
gone from a few incredibly fast processors in one box to many smaller
processors. It's easier to design slower processors than it is to
design faster ones, and to design really fast ones (the kind of chips
we will be seeing as cutting-edge in 5 or 10 years), it takes a lot of
work to develop and debug the design before you can even sample the chip.
SGI (among others) seems to have realized this, and decided to move to
Merced in the future -- unless you sell a lot of processors or very
expensive processors[1], the chip division goes in the red, which no
company likes.

It's a win for the hardware vendors to have this development
done in one place, and Intel is logically positioned to do that since
they have lots of money to throw at the problem (the Alpha is another
logical choice since it's already faster than almost any other single
processor out there, which is companies like Samsung are picking up on
the 21264).

-- Michael

[1] - and very fast and expensive processors tend to lose; the price
per performance may be the same as for cheap processors, but the market
isn't going to be large enough for the chip vendor to profit once a
competitor enters the market. SGI workstations have long provided the
best 3D graphics performance, but once cheapo PCs were remotely
competitive, they stole market share and even expanded the graphics
workstation market. And now SGI is moving towards the PC market.

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