On May 12, 1999 I attended the HP Hot Topic Road Show '99 at our 
local HP office (sponsored by NEORUG) where Ken Kroeker gave an 
overview of IA-64 and the new N-series server.

As you might expect, the show was slanted to the HP9000 market, 
but Ken did mention some items of interest to the HP3000 market.
IA-64 uses explicit parallelism, and was talked about in the 
context of HP's EPIC chip set (which stands for Explicitly 
Parallel Instruction Computer).

Some of the more salient points I gleaned from this presentation:

1)  IA-64 must be capable of running HP-UX, MPE, and NT.

2)  There is no mixed mode in IA-64:  PA code cannot call IA-64 
code and vice versa.

3)  PA-RISC will be the MPE platform until the 2002-2003 time 
frame.  IA-64 will require a new MPE release.  However, similar 
to the MPE/V to MPE/iX transition, no recompile of code will be 
needed, and "classic" HP3000 code will run on IA-64.

4)  The IA-64 release of MPE/iX will not necessarily be a 64-bit 
release of MPE/iX.

5)  IA-64 supports (requires?) dynamic optimization of code; that 
is, there is a separate code space for each user and that user's 
code is optimized for the way they do things.

6)  The central USA HP sales manager (name forgotten!) made a 
short presentation where he announced that there will be some 
kind of e-services announcement next week.  He also said that 
HP was revamping their sales force to focus on their customers 
again (surprise, surprise!).

I spoke with the above-mentioned HP sales manager after his talk 
and asked him point-blank if this meant that we would be seeing 
HP sales people again, even if we weren't a State Farm or Boeing 
or Southwest Air and he replied in the affirmative.  We'll see.

Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
Voice: (330) 527-2124                   Therm-O-Link, Inc.
  Fax: (330) 527-2123                   PO Box 285; 10513 Freedom St.
Email: [log in to unmask]       Garrettsville, Ohio  44231