September 22, 1999 Web posted at: 11:18 a.m. EDT (1518 GMT) by Marc Songini

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(IDG) -- IBM wants to be the first vendor to offer Unix on Intel's much touted 64-bit Merced chip.

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IBM is off to a decent start, having completed a 24 hour dry run at an Intel lab last week. During the testing, researchers powered up a Merced chip with a copy of the Monterey operating system on it.

Monterey is a joint project between IBM, Santa Cruz Operation and Sequent to create a 32-bit and 64-bit Intel-based version of Unix.

IBM is now boasting it is the first vendor to run Unix on Merced.

Getting Monterey to boot up on a Merced chip in such a short time is an extraordinary achievement, claims Rajiv Samant, general manager of Unix at IBM. This a harbinger of things to come, says IBM, and the company hopes the ISVs and OEM partners will start porting their applications to Monterey.

With this and other moves in the Unix world, Big Blue and its cohorts are hoping to get the edge over market leader Sun and other rivals, such as Hewlett Packard.

IBM also recently announced the Linux operating system would be compatible with both Monterey and its current PowerPC AIX offering.