Despite all the noise being made about Intel Corp’s forthcoming 64-bit chip, Merced, vendors and analysts working at the market coal-face don’t expect users to buy into IA-64 architecture for another four or five years. Talking at the ‘Charting the Future’ round table in London this week, vendors such as Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co and analyst Gartner Group suggested it would take until 2003 for the IA 64 chip – expected to be released in 2000 – to become commonplace. Gordon Graylish, director of marketing for Intel Architecture in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is even more cautious, claiming that he could not definitely say when IA-64 chips would be prevalent in the market. Graylish expects that the demand for the new chips would be enterprise application driven and that it could take years for the architecture to filter down onto the broader server market. So what will happen to Merced in the interim? Graylish sees the chip being aggressively deployed by enterprise developers working on true 64-bit applications. However, he expects their volume seller to be the new 32-bit server chip called Foster (CI No 3,513), which is expected to be available before Merced and is said to run some applications faster – especially the sort of 32-bit apps that are omnipresent in the mid-range server sector.
