An article in top US magazine Information Week has posed the question whether Intel's 64-bit Merced platform is based on Risc or Cisc. And now a controversy has arisen over whether Merced is attempting to bridge the gap between its possibly doomed Willamette IA-32 architecture and other chips that will come out this year, from both Transmeta and IBM. According to Tikiri Wanduragola, a former chip and bus designer at IBM who nows helps Big Blue sell its Netfinity servers, Merced is a hybrid. He said earlier today that the Merced design is a compromise between Cisc and Risc technology. Intel insists that it still has on board most of the major PC vendors, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US, allowed Compaq to take over Digital on the condition that the chip Goliath fab its Alpha chips. Because Intel holds all of the information about Merced very close to its chest, it is probable that PC vendors -- including HP, Compaq and Dell -- will not find out until silicon is ready. ®