Merced's Rocky Road

[Richard <nospam [at] zen.co.uk>]

Hello

I was thumbing through PC Plus this morning
(http://www.pcplus.co.uk for our overseas readers) and noticed an
article at page 14 which looked kind of interesting.

It's headed Merceds rocky road and goes on about Intel's first IA-
64 chip which is said to be in trouble because of the amount of time
it has taken for it to reach the point where it can be sold to
prospective buyers. This is (in itself) is interesting reading.

At the bottom of the page the last paragraph quickly mentions a new
Russian processor........

Meanwhile in Russia a company called Elbrus has secured Government
funding to produce its own 64-bit processor initially running at
600MHz. The E2k uses a clunky 0.35 micron process and VLIW, Very
Long Instruction Words [must be the Russian cyrillics eh ?]. Elbrus
claim its chip will out-perform the Merced by a factor of three to
five. It will also be compatible with x86 software. The chip has
been developed by a team of engineers who have been together for 30
years, working on supercomputers for the Russian Ministry of Defence.
The team's previous projects included developing superscalar
architecture, 15 years ahead of the West.
Christopher Lloyd's <-(name of writer)

Hmmm..... could be something to look forward to ? Bit different
from the cold war that we went through all those years ago.

Thanks

Richard
Sheffield UK

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