Strutting its newly-won Unix enterprise credentials Hewlett- Packard Co promises it will introduce a ‘big daddy’ enterprise server using the Intel Corp Merced chip in the year 2000 that will relegate its current high-end V-Class to the mid-range class. HP says it will double the performance of all of its computer systems every year for the next three years – until and beyond the introduction of Merced. Next year a new generation of the K-Class technical servers will be the first systems HP ships that will be board-upgradable to Merced chip in 1999. It will do in excess of 40,000 tpmC transactions per minute, up from 21,000 now. There will be higher clock speed versions of the current PA- 8200 RISC-based K-Class before the 1998 PA-8500 arrives. HP’s set to reveal more details of its Merced system roadmap and upgrade plans next week in New York. It’s also going to ballyhoo the fact that 150 software companies and large end users are now using its four migration centers to transition their PA-RISC applications to Merced. Although PA-RISC binaries will run on Merced most ISVs are expected to re-compile and re-tune their programs to take advantage of the IA-64 instruction set architecture’s EPIC explicit parallelism features. There are more migration centers to come on stream too.
