At the company's recent developer forum, Intel actually booted up a would-be version of Windows NT running on a Merced emulator on top of a Pentium. Intel plans to release the software so developers can write Merced-optimized code. The actual chip is expected to be available in sample form in mid- 1999. At least that's what the company hopes. At the same conference there was discussion about the sales brick wall that high-performance computers have hit.
Nobody is interested unless they're cheap.
Well, also because there's no compelling reason to have them. I've concluded that all along people only wanted faster hard disks, and now that the hard disk business has outpaced the processor, we're caught up with our computing needs for the foreseeable future. It's now apparent that hard disks were the key to understanding growth. Needless to say, most people who hear this evaluation think I'm a crackpot. But the brick wall is undeniable.