In all the K7-Athlon hullabaloo yesterday, Chipzilla snuck out a press release, which named a firm which will be a test site for its IA-64 family of chips. The timing of the release, along with a release which shows huge price reductions on various networking products, is purely coincidental. Digital Domain which created special effects for films Titanic and the Fifth Element, will serve as a test site for Merced, said Intel. It will also adopt PIII and PIII/Xeon processors, Intel said. And the company will demonstrate its latest technology at Siggraph in LA, which starts today. Intel already claims Xerox, Daimler Chrysler, Pratt & Whitney, Lear and Xerox as some of its workstation customers. But, Terry Shannon, Alpha analyst and editor of Shannon knows Compaq said the spin off of Digital Domain Station X Studios, still relies heavily on the Alpha chip. He said: "In fact, Alpha was used for Titanic, What Dreams May Come, My Favorite Martian, The Hunley, etc. "The perpetrator of Titanic, et al, was one Grant Boucher, who formed Station X Studios right after Titanic came out. He much prefers Alpha to SGI boxes... said the Alpha farm was up almost 100 percent of the time whilst SGI was up 2/3 of the time. "The Alpha render farm consists of 150-odd Alpha clone workstations running Linux part of the time, and NT the rest of the time. Station X was a beta site for EV6 and the DS20. One might surmise they currently are testing much faster Alphas." Personally, we've never flown in a Lear jet but we have played Microsoft Fright Stimulator... ®