What's New with Intel? A Look at Their Pentium III and IA-64 (Merced) Chips

The Pentium III processor is the newest, and probably the last processor in the IA-32 architecture design by Intel. On its debut in late February 1999, it was under controversy. Not for its enhancements over its predecessor, The Pentium II processor, but for its decision to insert the ID number into the chip. This is supposed to help the security of e-commerce, but it can be used to track people on the internet for marketing or other, malicious intentions. Never the less, there are quite a few important changes in the new design. The goals that Intel had put forth in designing the IA-64 Merced processor was to design an architecture that could lead the industry in performance, be able to expand the chip over the next few decades, and maintain lull hardware compatibility with the IA-32. They decided to abandon their old architecture for their high-end processors. The new processor takes a few pages from CISC, RISC, and VLIW. The first processor from the IA-64 Merced family is code-named Itanium and is due to be released in the second or third quarter of 2000.