Just to show that Intel treats everyone differently, here we embark on the first story of many over the next day or two about the future plans Chipzilla has in store for us.

Yesterday, we revealed details of the roadmap Intel has just dished out to its distributors and dealers, which only covers boxed desktop chips, including the Celeron and the Timna. This roadmap is entirely different from the latest one we've seen - it's for OEMs - but not the top OEM, the Dell Corporation.

The 800/266 with 4MB of cache will cost a staggering $4227 at launch, the 800/266 Itanium with 2MB of cache will cost $1980 at launch, the 733/266 Itanium with 4MB of cache will cost a staggering $4227 at launch, and the 733/266 Itanium with 2MB of cache will cost $1177. Surely some mistake here, vis-a-vis the 800/266 and the 733/266, which are priced the same? But that's what the roadmap says.

You want to know when you can spend your four thousand bucks on a top-end Merced, right? Well, when we glanced at the roadmap, the prices aligned with some Xeon price cuts that come on 16 July. So that looks like the date to us, although the Itanium prices were floating in a place all of their own on the document we saw. There are some further price cuts on Xeons in September, and it looks as though Intel will try and keep the Itanium prices the same during that period.

Later, we will reveal pricing for other of Intel's server products and reveal that Foster, the server version of Willamette, has slipped to Q1 next year, with volume coming in late Q1. Also, we are now faced with a barrage of fresh code names. So be gentle, while we attempt to sift through 30 pages of notes we took.

By the way, the roadmaps Intel shows journalists are by-and-large, very bland confections indeed. We suppose this is on a need-to-know basis... ®