A Register reader who calls himself the Sixth Vulture has painstakingly compiled job adverts Intel has placed since the beginning of the month. And the list is long, suggesting either Intel is short of staff or is ramping up its Merced project. On 1 March, Intel advertised a total of 20 Merced vacancies, including jobs for software engineers, system hardware design engineers, product engineers, logic engineers, architecture validation enginners and project managers. One job, for a Merced circuit designer engineer, is particularly intriguing. "In this position you will work on VLSI CMOS circuit design for the Merced CPU and latest Merced CPU and future IA-64 bit architecture microprocessor." What, we wonder, is the "latest" Merced CPU and what is the earlier one? Total engineer job ads for Intel since early March run into the hundreds, the Sixth Vulture has demonstrated. ®