By William Fellows
Hewlett-Packard Co’s new Windows NT workstation line up (see separate story) paves the way for the company to differentiate its Intel IA-64 Merced and McKinley offerings – in Kayaks and Visualize Personal Workstations respectively – however HP says it’s now clear that there will be no 64-bit Intel capability in reality until McKinley is delivered. McKinley is the second generation IA-64 part and real the RISC contender which HP holds the reins to. Intel people come to work on McKinley at HP, it says categorically.
Moreover, HP is also concerned that the benefits of the new Fahrenheit graphics environment being created in conjunction with Microsoft Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc are too long coming. It could be in danger of losing the plot unless it can get a coherent story together. The problem is that the Fahrenheit is more of a closed club and presents less of target to ISVs than HP’s current DirectModel 3D rendering libraries. HP, which has already changed DirectModel to incorporate SGI’s OpenGL on the way to Fahrenheit, expects some of the high-level Fahrenheit work to roll out probably early 2000 with the lower-level technology to follow.
