Intel Corp says that the first manufacturing samples of its Merced processor are on track to ship by the middle of this year. The chip is set to go into production in the middle of next year. Intel says it has now embarked on the final stages of the circuit design layout, and has successfully booted seven operating systems, including the 64-bit version of Microsoft Corp’s Windows 2000. The others are HP-UX, SCO Unix, Sun Solaris, SGI Irix, Novell Modesto and Digital Unix. Linux is the next one on the list. The follow-on, McKinley, will run at a clock speed of over 1-GHz and have over three times the bus bandwidth, and is due for the first samples late next year and product late in 2001.
