By William Fellows
Hewlett-Packard Co’s Unix workstation division wants to be at the Merced party and will offer systems based on the chip, even though it believes McKinley, Intel Corp’s second generation IA-64 design, will be more suited to the floating-point intensive requirements of most of these customers. However even Madison, McKinley’s successor, won’t satisfy customers using HP’s largest Visualize graphics configurations, the company admits. HP isn’t currently planning to offer PA-RISC workstations, which are board-upgradeable to Merced, but will instead offer two lines side by side. There don’t appear to be internal economies to support such a design, even if some components and packaging are eventually shared. That will blow out of the water a recent rationalization of Unix workstation models down to five right (and its been working on that rationalization for ten years, it claims). But the idea is to get those who want to started on IA- 64 application migration and development as soon as possible. It seems unlikely then that it will have to use the so-called Stretch system bus that HP will deploy in servers and which are board-upgradeable to Merced. Instead it will use vanilla Merced/P7 system bus – and PCI/AGP I/O architecture – or more likely, a system architecture of its own design. In any event it says it will strip floating-point cells from IA-64 and integrate them on to new Visualize graphics boards. It will do the same for the PA-8600. HP says the change it made to its PA-RISC strategy when Intel went public with the delay to Merced was to turn chip projects with code names into products with numbers: PA-8800 and PA-8900.
