Sources close to Intel architects told The Register late today that there is now a ruckus between them and engineers from Microsoft. The problem is that compilers produced for Merced do not perform inherent parallelism in the codelines and Intel engineers have now gone back to the drawing board. The situation between the two companies has become so bad that Intel engineers working on site have stopped checking Win64 code. Just before Christmas, we reported that Microsoft engineers had succeeded in booting Win64 on the Alpha platform. Compiler performance, our sources maintain, is out by a factor of five and this is likely to lead to a delay in the 64 bit Intel chip. Meanwhile, Merced is threatened by Compaq's Alpha EV68 platform, which will be a 0.18 micron part. And Merced's die size is likely to be three times bigger than this particular rev of Alpha. This all makes us wonder about how cosy Eckhard Pfeiffer and Andy Grove are these days... ® See also Compaq boots 64-bit Alpha server