Intel has confirmed it is still on schedule to ship Merced in the year 2000 with production samples going to its customers in June. That follows claims from an Alpha developer on the comp.archnews forum that the Merced platform is dead. According to the engineer, IA-64 has a number of features which will be very hard to implement. Predication, he says, is very complex with multiple outstanding loads which depend on the memory consistency model being used. Bits to designate independence of operations will bloat the I stream by at least 25 per cent. "Even the stuff that Intel has talked about aren't really simple to implement with any great performance. It appears Merced is dead. It rests on HP's chip in 2001 or 2002 to see where things really are. Three more years, do you really want to wait?" However, an Intel spokesperson said the Merced project was still firm. Rumours of its demise are untrue. It is undead. ®