Denying that Merced slippage will hurt it, Hewlett-Packard Co says it’s strange how Sun Microsystems Inc managed to bury the six-month slippage of its own UltraSparc III to the end of next year. Moreover the system transition to UltraSparc III it claims will require a box swap, unlike new PA-RISC systems it will ship next year which will be board-upgradable to Merced. HP finds that end users have so far shown little interest in making use of its IA-64 simulator to migrate custom PA-RISC applications to Merced. The performance gain isn’t worth the effort. However it expects most ISVs to port applications, claiming that hundreds have already begun the transition. HP says Santa Cruz Operation Inc can’t claim the SCO Unix simulator for IA-64 gives it any advantage over the HP-UX as HP’s had simulators for three years and has had HP-UX running on the thing for more than a year. HP says it has new technology up its sleeve, which will enable it to create systems with many processors than the top-end 16-way V- Class HP 9000 series boxes it currently offers. It didn’t say whether it meant the 32-way systems due later this year, or the distributed shared memory ccNUMA features are to be assimilated into the commercial servers from its Convex Computer subsidiary’s technical servers.
