Our stringer at Compaq Innovate said today that Eckhard Pfeiffer, CEO of the company, refused to demonstrate the Intel Merced emulator. Instead, Pfeiffer demoed Windows NT64 on the Alpha platform, while blatantly snubbing Merced IA-64 solutions, as predicted here. Pfeiffer, forced to demonstrate an emulation Merced platform at Winhec last week, chose the four CPU Alpha path at Innovate, our reporter said. Said our reporter, who chose not to be named: "Compaq reprised the April 7 WinHEC 99 demo with the same hardware and software used last week in Los Angeles. The hardware consisted of a 4-CPU AlphaServer 4100 with 7GB of memory; the software was 64-bit Windows 2000 with 64-bit SQL Server. "Compaq ran the same SQL query used in last week's demo with the same results: a SQL query that took ~11 minutes on 32-bit SQL Server completed in ~30 seconds on the 63-bit instantiation." He added: " Last week's demo took place in a carefully controlled environment: Steve Ballmer was the only person who had direct acess to the demo system. Here at Innovate 99 in Houston, security restrictions were a bit more lax. The 64-bit OS has the same look and feel as the Beta 3 release of 32-bit Windows 2000 we run in our home office... it just runs WAY faster." ®