PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. (02/16/2000) - Intel inside took on new meaning here at Intel Developer Forum this week when system vendors, showing off their IA-64 server products, admitted that the systems being demonstrated actually were supplied by Intel and were not their own.
Every system vendor, including Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Fujitsu, Compaq, Dell, IBM and others, was given software development vehicles, or SDVs, for IDF. Vendors use these boxes to integrate system software and components on a new platform.
So what appeared to be vendors' unique IA-64 implementations were really the same SDVs supplied to all the vendors by Intel and put in an OEM shell.
Attendees leaving the IA-64 Demonstration Suite, when told that they were not actually watching demonstrations on different versions of the platform, were neither surprised nor upset.
"Take the top off most PCs and whose motherboard do you see anyway?" asked Frank Flanagan, engineering director at Accelerated Encryption Processing, in Dublin, Ireland. "There are a lot [fewer] people making their own systems nowadays," he said.
However, Scott Hudson, a senior analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group, in San Jose, Calif., opted for a bit more truth in demonstrations.
"It would be nice if they clarified that," Hudson said.
The fact that no system vendor has anything more to work with than an SVD may mean at the least that vendors will be hard pressed to ship IA-64 products by the end of the year said one system vendor who asked not to be identified.
"Everybody is running late," the vendor said.
Other vendors said that although ship dates could not be nailed down, the SDVs allowed them to stay on track, and they expected to have systems ready within three weeks to six months after Intel ships its IA-64 processors.
Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., is at http://www.intel.com.
InfoWorld Editor at Large Ephraim Schwartz is based in San Francisco.