At the Intel Developer Forum last month, the company detailed plans to focus its development efforts on UNIX, rather than on Windows NT. The first step will be to join several I/O hardware and UNIX operating system vendors in a consortium to develop a standard device driver interface. These vendors include Compaq/Digital, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SCO, and SUN. The UDI (uniform driver interface) aims to overcome the lack of interoperability faced by companies that deliver hardware to the UNIX market. Today, an interface card vendor is required to develop and support different device drives for each version of UNIX.
Intel is also beginning to ship kits to vendors to let them debug prQducts that will work with UNIX on its IA-64 Merced CPU even before the chip is available in silicon. This will assure that complementary products are available when the chip begins to be shipped in mid-2000.
Intel has determined that it cannot scale NT beyond four processors, but can scale UNIX to as many as 64 processors. Therefore, it is making a major commitment to UNIX in order to avoid being locked into the lower end of the server market.
Despite all of these moves, industry analysts expect Windows NT to remain the biggest selling operating system for Intel servers.
[Contact: Intel at www.intel.com].
