There will be four way Merced systems available for its customers in June next year, a Hewlett Packard executive said today. But whether all of the hardware vendors who originally committed to the platform are still with it is a trickier question. Last week, Dr Josef Reger, a senior executive at Fujitsu-Siemens in Germany, said his company will port its BS2000 mainframe OS to Merced. When asked why Fujitsu Siemens did not seem to be part of Intel's porting system, he said: "With all respect to Intel, we do not need their expertise to help us with our plans". Compaq, with Tru64 (D/UX), has of course already dropped out of the software porting race, while yesterday Sun confirmed it had managed to port the Solaris OS to Merced silicon. Hugh Jenkins, enterprise product marketing manager at HP UK, said today his company was on target to produce a Merced-Itanium "very shortly after" June next year. He said HP will sell a four-way system initially. HP has its own Merced chipset, based on its But doubt still remains over which memory technology Merced-Itanium will employ. At the Intel Developer Forum last September, there was no sign of Rambus technology on Intel's own prototype. Further, IBM has already committed to using its own chipset on its flavour of Merced when it launches. That is likely to use double data rate (DDR) synchronous memory, which IBM is promoting heavily. And Fujitsu Siemens, which last week introduced a scaleable Sparc clone server, may use the Reliance chipset for its Merced. Reliance is a subsidiary of Fujitsu, and was adopted by Compaq after it abandoned its own SMP Triflex architecture three years back. See also Seven Dramurai ride two memory standards at once Intel abandons server Rambus efforts