The CEO of Intel today attempted to play down competition from Compaq's Alpha platform and said that Eckhard Pfeiffer's firm was still committed to Merced. Speaking at a Q&A session after a keynote speech he delivered to over 500 business executives in London today, Barrett said: "Compaq bought the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and they have a $3 billion to $4 billion business with Alpha. "Compaq is a leader in servers with Intel architecture and I understand they've just shipped their 200 millionth Intel server last week. "They [Compaq] are very committed to the Intel architecture. They're still committed to using Merced architecture. We'll have Compaq and most of the rest of the world with us." He said that while Alpha was competition to Intel's IA-64 Merced platform, his company had "competition everywhere". That included competition from MIPS and Sun Sparc too. "That's the name of the game," he said. Compaq moving to Alpha for Tandem represented only a very small part of its total business, worth an estimated $40 billion, he added. ®