Reports that Merced is dead are highly premature, sources close to Intel's plans said today. Instead, the Merced is to future IA-64 architecture as the Celeron is to the Pentium II, the source added. Of course, the Celeron was a cut-down Pentium II. The source said that there are similarities between Merced and McKinley. Intel is on track to produce the Merced within its time scale, as faithfully reported here, but systems will likely only be used as evaluation platforms. That is part of Intel's long term plan for the IA-64 platform. According to the source, most corporations will take a suck-it-and-see approach to Merced, looking for future platforms to implement the technology satisfactorily. Now Intel has called us, and the representative was at pains to point out our metaphor is pushing the envelope a little. The representative said: "You can't cut down something which hasn't been made yet." But you get our point. ®