Those awfully nice people at Intel have decided what we all should be doing with our hard-earned cash in a coupla years’ time. And, surprise surprise, it involves handing over loads of cash for shiny new IA64 systems. Despite HP’s ‘McKinley or die’ approach, Merced still looms large in Chipzilla’s own road maps. In the middle of next year, Intel aims to supply 8-way Merced servers at a price tag of around $17K – or at least it aims for OEMs to supply them. But hey, Intel supplies almost ready-to-run systems for the server marketplace today, so next year maybe it’ll bite the bullet and put an Intel badge on the outside. These 8-way Merceds will feature 8Mb of L2 cache and have the delightfully-named Double Pumped 133MHz FSB. Maybe someone should tell them that in the UK, pumping is a polite term for farting. Intel’s concept of Double Pumping is a tad more prosaic – the bus sends two packets per tick instead of one - so two farts for the price of one. Intel also expects these systems to use NGIO and address up to 64Gb of RAM and these will be BIG systems with an expected power consumption of 2KW. For a mere $10K, you should be able to become the proud owner of a 4-way Merced server (again with Double Pumped Fart Side Bus) using Intel’s own 460GX chipset. More mundane features of these systems will include PCI 64/66, SCSI Ultra3 LVD and IDE ATA-66 disks, RAID and mega fans to clear away the stink from the Fart Side Bus. ®