Intel Developer Forum The background to the introduction of Intel's Merced processor earlier this week has emerged. The Register beat the world's press with the news that Intel had booted silicon in the week before the Forum. According to the report between that first boot and Intel's Craig Barrett showing it, engineers worked flat out to show a stable demonstration at the Intel Developer Forum. So far, and in its early stages, it is as fast as AMD's Athlon using the SpecINT benchmark but shows far better performance in SpecFP. If the debug and testing stage goes to schedule, full production will start around this time in the year 2000. Merced will initially appear with 1Mb, 2Mb and 4Mb on die SRAM cache, but our sources suggest that when it is shrunk to .18 micron, which will happen at release time, Intel is likely to achieve 1GHz speeds. Your Register had a world scoop at the last Intel Developer Forum in February with pictures of the cartridge, which may be found here. ®