Intel did give away a few thousand Merced development systems around 2001 to ISVs to "seed the market".
***Thanks, I didn't know that. I'm aware that the Intel 64 Fund provided seed money to develop "applications for Merced". I guess they might have used the money to actually buy the machines, but I'm not aware that the machines themselves were given away. I guess it's possible they could have been. This was what I found, Do you have a link that says the machines were given away?
http://www.varbusiness.com/sections/technology/tech.jhtml?articleId=18804181 And if Intel has anything to say about it, the introduction of the first member of the family will be accompanied by some of those new software solutions. Intel and HP have disclosed details of the architecture and the instruction set. And Intel has formed a $250 million fund, The Intel 64 Fund, that will provide seed money to ISVs for applications for the new chips.
http://www.x86.org/news/1999/news051099.htm Intel Corp. here today announced the creation of a $250 million equity investment fund to help companies develop new Internet and enterprise applications for the company's upcoming IA-64 architecture. The IA-64 architecture slated to hit the market in the middle of 2000 with the launch of Intel's first 64-bit processor, code-named "Merced."
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 8, 2003 - With its Intel® Itanium® 2 processor boasting record-setting performance, several operating systems and the availability of 1,000 applications, Intel Corporation is challenging companies to compare Intel Itanium 2-based servers head-to-head against proprietary systems during a free trial period [...]
it looks like IPF freebies now only exist in the overactive imagination of a few FBs.
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