Although HP was demonstrating a simulation of the IA-64 processor in its booth at HP World, performance charts and plans show the technology is at least three years from delivery in HP 3000s. Snow said HP would not be introducing IA-64 HP 3000s until “at least 2002.”

One reason for the timing is that HP’s own PA-RISC chips will be faster than Merced for some time to come.

“Initially those chips and those [IA-64] servers won’t have higher performance than the PA-RISC servers, but if you look at the performance curves, ultimately they will,” said Dave Snow, the Platform Planning Manger at CSY. “We need to support that technology in the next decade.”

A chart of expected release times and performance comparisons showed that a PA-8700 chip running at 700 MHz will outperform Merced, and a 900 MHz PA-8800 chip will match the performance of McKinley, the next-generation chip in the HP-Intel alliance.

The HP booth demonstration showed an Envisex C3000 HP-UX workstation running a simulation of the IA-64 instruction set. In the demonstration, HP launched and ran Netscape Navigator program code that was written for PA-RISC HP 9000s, passing it through the simulator.