Intel applies more pressure on Alpha as IA64 ramps

Intel Developer Forum At a keynote speech this morning, John Miner, who heads up Intel's enterprise division, said that the company would move high end Pentium Xeons lower in the market as it ramps up the Merced and IA64 platform. And there is no need for large companies to use competing platforms like the Alpha, Miner said. Miner said that IA64 would outperform non Intel architectures by a factor of 10 to one. Miner said "When the 32-bit family hasn't the right capability, IA64 will be there for customer needs." It will sell Xeons with 256K, 512K, 1Mb and 2Mb caches at "an affordable low level". He said: "When Merced is in volume, it will outperform non-Intel systems. Merced will outperform Alpha systems." That's not very likely, according to sources close to Alpha plans. In Q3 of 2000, we will see a 1.5GHz 21264 with large on chip level two cache, supporting 8Mb level three one gigahertz DDRAM and knocking out 90 SpecInt95 and 150 SpecFp95. He said there was no reason for corporate users to take any other non-Intel route when Merced and the rest of the IA64 family will have a range of operating systems and vendor support unparalleled by other chip manufacturers. This could be interesting after Compaq's decision to pull the plug on Win64 for the Alpha platform. While Compaq will have Linux and its own D/UX (Tru64) running on Alphas, the only platform to have Win64 will be IA64 chips from Intel. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) might well be interested in Intel's latest claims. You may remember that the FTC was very concerned to ensure the survival of the Alpha platform. It is very much worth looking at this story: FTC to appoint guardians for Alpha Compaq's (or Microsoft's) decision to dump Win64 for the Alpha, coupled with the Intel statements above, may well be of interest to the guardians of competition in the US. ®