“Sun Microsystems Inc. will make an early version of its Solaris
operating system for Intel Corp.’s forthcoming IA-64
[Merced]architecture available to key software vendors this
fall.
The move will give software vendors a head start on
developing and testing 64-bit Solaris applications for the IA-64
platform…”
“…vendors in Sun’s IA-64 independent software vendor program
will also receive an Intel-configured IA-64 simulator system and a
suite of tools and compilers for migrating current 32-bit
Solaris-on-Intel applications to 64-bit IA servers.”