Hewlett-Packard Co has defined another member of its Precision Architecture RISC family that will extend the life of native PA-8000 boxes well beyond the introduction of systems based on the Intel Corp Merced part, which is now expected early 1998, our sister publication Unigram.X reports. The PA-8500, which may see the light of day in limited quantities late next year, follows a mid-1997 PA-8200 part, and might still not be the last of the PA-8000 family, the company says. Although Hewlett claims HP-UX applications will run faster on Merced systems than on PA-RISC, the extension of its RISC architecture envelope suggests that either all is not well with Merced, or that its fate is simply out of Hewlett’s hands entirely now. Significantly, the company admits one reason for continuing PA-8000 system designs beyond the introduction of Merced is that it hasn’t yet worked out how it will handle PA-RISC-to-Merced migration. The PA-8500 is intended to double PA-8000’s performance: the part currently delivers 11.8 SPECint95 and 20.2 SPECfp95. The 8500 is the part that was previously referred to as 8400 (CI No 2,934), a tag that was dropped to avoid confusion with other 8400 lines, including Digital Equipment Corp’s 8400 TurboLasers. The 0.35 micron PA-8200 is now planned for a mid-1997 introduction.
