By Timothy Prickett Morgan
At the Intel Developer Forum last week, Sun Microsystems Inc announced that it plans to make an early release of its Solaris operating system available in the fall for Intel’s Merced IA-64 processors. More precisely, the software will be written for the IA-64 simulator, and also possibly early machines if the Merced chips are working and in fully functional systems by then. The software will only be available to key Sun software partners, and the exact number of partners who will get to play with it in a few months is unknown. During presentations at the IDF, Sun executives said that, despite some opinions to the contrary, it was committed to delivering an optimized version of Solaris for IA-64 and that its biggest application software partners wanted to be able to deliver for IA-64 boxes. About 3,500 of the 12,000 Solaris applications available worldwide run on the Intel implementation of Solaris, so Sun can’t exactly ignore Merced.
Sun says that independent software vendors that join its IA-64 ISV Program will be able to get the tools they need to create application suites that are optimized for IA-64 using the existing IA-32 implementation of Solaris, coupled with special IA-64 cross compilation tools. These include early versions of Sun Workshop compilers and special tools for moving code from 32 to 64 bits. Once ported to these IA-64 compilers, ISVs are then able to test their modified applications in the Intel Pre-Silicon Software Development Environment, what we all call the IA-64 simulator. This simulator comes directly from Intel, which pre- configures it to match the Merced’s characteristics.
Although Sun doesn’t say this, ISVs will then have to actually get their hands on a Merced server to further tune the performance of the box to match the I/O and memory characteristics of the machines on which they intend to support their applications. Sun says that ISVs who already have their applications ported to the 64-bit UltraSparc-II implementation of Solaris will only require a simple recompile to run, which is a laughably bold claim. In addition to the software tools and simulator, Sun is burying developers in technical white papers and giving them direct access to the software engineering development team to help them get their ports done in time for the Merced launch, which is still expected in mid-2000.
