Merced Design Completed

NoWhere Man writes "Merced's design is complete and are due to go into production mid-2000, but it is expected that McKinley, Merced's successor (due late 2000), will likely be the most popular in Intel's 64-bit chips. "

Comments

And what about the compilers?

[Kaa]

Merced family is heavily dependent for performance on paralellizing compilers. I suspect that making the silicon will be the easy part (I'm a software guy, hardware guys may disagree with that), but making good compilers to take advantage of the chip will be a bitch.

It seems that we are entering an era when the performance of your application is going to depend on the quality of your compiler/interpreter as much as on the actual hardware inside the machine. This is both good and scary. Good if the free compilers (like egcs) will be able to compete with and outperform commercial compilers -- that will be a great boost to free software. But there is also the scary part: if the free compilers fail to keep pace with commercial offerings, they will die. Think about it: if a kernel compiled under, say, Sun compiler will run twice as fast as one compiled under gcc, what will happen to gcc?


Kaa