Sources at Hewlett-Packard today confirmed that it will skip supplying Merced to its customers and instead move directly to the McKinley platform, when that is released. When HP launched its upward-compatible version of its N Series a few weeks back, which includes a chipset for the IA-64 platform, it also said it would continue creating future versions of its PA Risc chip platform (see HP to debut Merced box). Now an informed source has confirmed that it will not introduce Merced, even as an evalutation platform for its customers. As reported here some months back, Compaq engineers who had worked on the Merced IA-64 platform were told to occupy their time more usefully. That means the Alpha platform (see Compaq Merced designers flee coop). At the time, senior Intel executives were infuriated by that report. ®