Monterey Steps Into Merced Arena

IBM Corp. wants to be the first vendor to offer Unix on Intel Corp.'s much touted 64-bit Merced chip.

Big Blue is off to a decent start, having completed a 24 hour dry run at an Intel lab last week. During the testing, researchers powered up a Merced chip with a copy of the Monterey operating system on it. Monterey is a joint project between IBM, the Santa Cruz Operation Inc. and Sequent Computer Systems Inc. to create a 32-bit and 64-bit Intel-based version of Unix.

IBM is now boasting it is the first vendor to run Unix on Merced.

Getting Monterey to boot up on a Merced chip in such a short time is an extraordinary achievement, claims Rajiv Samant, general manager of Unix at IBM. This a harbinger of things to come, says IBM, and the company hopes ISVs (independent software vendors) and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners will start porting their applications to Monterey.

With this and other moves in the Unix world, Big Blue and its cohorts are hoping to get the edge over market leader Sun and other rivals, such as Hewlett-Packard. IBM also recently announced the Linux operating system would be compatible with both Monterey and its current PowerPC AIX offering.