A senior executive at Hewlett Packard today denied that the company will move directly to McKinley, bypassing Merced. Hugh Jenkins, enterprise product marketing manager at Hewlett Packard UK, said: "We will do Merced. We would not have invested money in the Intel IA 64 fund otherwise." That news is likely to make Intel feel better. Although Compaq also put money into the new IA64 fund, sources close to the company suggested that its views on the future of the IA64 platform were not so clearcut. An insider said: "We still have not resolved the distinctions between the Compaq server division and the Alpha server division. What is more important to me is whether or not Compaq will continue investing in Alpha technology." Yesterday, Joe D'Elia, senior semiconductor analyst at Dataquest Europe, said HP has been entirely consistent about its IA64 strategy. The contradictions beg questions about whether the old (PA RISC) guard at HP are battling with the new (IA64) guard. D'Elia suggested that only happened at the bottom of the PA range of chips. So there is a schism, and it's still on, a little reminiscent of the early arguments in the Christian church between Greek Orthodox, Roman, and Coptic. ®