Banking on 64-bit Merced

ENT, March 4, 1998 by Joseph Mckendrick

Intel Corp. says it will ship the first chip of its 64-bit microprocessor family -- codenamed Merced -- sometime in 1999. Can a Merced-enabled, 64-bit version of Windows NT be far behind?

A number of vendors have already committed to the platform, which will run both Windows NT and UNIX. Hewlett-Packard Co., co-developer of the chip with Intel, will be porting its HP-UX operating system to Merced. Digital Equipment Corp. and Sequent Computer Systems Inc. (Beaverton, Ore.) are collaborating on a 64-bit UNIX initiative to establish Digital UNIX, augmented by Sequent technologies, on Merced. Sun Microsystems Inc. also will run its Solaris operating system on Merced.

Currently, Microsoft Corp. has a twofold 64-bit strategy, with plans to simultaneously release 64-bit versions of Windows NT for Merced and Digital's 64-bit Alpha chip in late 1999, according to Ed Muth, group product manager for Microsoft Corp. At that time, the release of 64-bit NT will be timed with "the general availability of Merced-based systems in the marketplace," he notes.

However, this may not occur until "Merced-based systems are shipping in volume," relates Joe Barkan, research director, platform and operating systems technologies group, with analyst firm the Gartner Group (Stamford, Conn.). Thus, bank on having a Windows NT-Merced system ready to go sometime in the year 2000, he estimates.

"Hardware typically runs ahead of software," he says. "Microsoft probably won't get the 32-bit version of NT 5.0 out until the second quarter of '99. That gives them another 6 months to a year to get the 64-bit version out the door. But users shouldn't jump on it on day one; they should wait for the first service pack, which could be 6 months later."

At this time, Microsoft anticipates that its 64-bit version of NT will be a variation of version 5.0, now in its initial beta. However, "it's too early to guess exactly what release it will be," Microsoft's Muth says. "We expect that it will be based on NT 5.0. The sources that are being used as the baseline for building 64-bit NT are the same sources that are going into the second beta for NT 5.0. We'll keep that work in sync."

The new 64-bit version of NT will also fully support existing 32-bit applications, according to Microsoft and Intel sources. "We intend to provide a 32-bit subsystem within the 64-bit operating system, just as we currently have a 16-bit subsystems within the 32-bit operating system," Muth says.

"Microsoft will also continue the evolution of 32-bit Windows for quite some time, especially for the consumer market," Gartner Group's Barkan says.

In a departure from its previous product strategies, Intel will continue the evolution of the IA-32 microprocessor, thereby maintaining two major product lines. "Looking beyond Deschutes, we have many new IA-32 microprocessors under development," says Fred Pollack, Intel Fellow. "We expect to grow IA-32 performance at a 50 percent rate for many years to come." Intel also has another team working on a second-generation IA-64 processor -- to begin shipping in 2001 -- that will have twice the performance of Merced, Pollack adds.

NT and UNIX: Perfect Together?

Analysts agree that hardware that runs both NT and UNIX may level the playing field between the operating systems. "There's a lot of expectation that Merced will change the way Intel-based servers are perceived in terms of enterprise-readiness," says James Greuner, senior analyst, with analyst firm the Aberdeen Group (Boston). "Intel's serious about being competitive with most UNIX systems. The performance differences are being stripped away at a very rapid pace."

"The exact same machine will run UNIX and NT fairly similarly, with about the same performance," Gartner Group's Barkan agrees. "NT machines will get more expensive on the high end, and the price of NT-based solutions, hardware, operating system and applications will go up. At the same time, the price of UNIX boxes and applications will come down. They're likely to be closer."

However, Barkan does not see any special hardware advantages in terms of swapping or migrating between NT and UNIX systems. "If you decide to make the jump, do you put the new operating system on the same box, which may be a year old, or another one? If you're migrating applications, you need to run them in parallel. You need a new box to do that." Such migration has never been commonplace on Digital's Alpha-based systems, which currently support NT, Digital UNIX and OpenVMS, he notes.

The key hardware benefit is more centralized administration of purchasing and system management, he says. "If I can buy all of those boxes for NT, and the run other operating systems in my environment, that might reduce support costs a bit," he says.

Why 64-bit?

One of the advantages of 64-bit computing is rapid access to extremely large databases that support high-volume transaction and query-based applications. In addition, 64-bit implementations "will take NT deep into the science and technology space," enabling sophisticated modeling and simulations, Microsoft's Muth says.