In relation to the below, I do have a question, If HP is killing off PA-RISC, why did they kill off a number of core guys on the IA-64 project? A bit ago on slashdot, there was a post about the closing of the NewJersey facility and the dropping of some 120 or so kernel developers. Not penny ante guys, deep guys with lots of years in, most were rumored to be working on the Intel port of HP-UX. Now, we work closely with HP at my work, and the rumors I've gotten from our guys are that Tru-64 is out, they are looking to HP-UX on Intel (not strongly, but someday), and they are keeping PA-RISC as the primary in order to avoid what Sun and Intel went through, because HP can "do what they like", because of their size (not my words). I also see Sun keeping Sparc, it wouldn't make much monetary sense to just can that architecture, especially for an arch that most of Sun seems to see as substandard. I also see SGI keeping MIPS, they thought about spinning MIPS off a few years ago, and then they realized how much taht could hurt them internally, so they didn't do it. I don't think all of teh vendors *want* a single architecture, they see from SGI's mistakes in marketing to the commodity market at proprietary rates (that's the main reason the early SGI Intel boxes died out, no one would pay $5K for a standard Intel Pent III with a really wicked, but proprietary, video (now without drivers)). That did not go unnoticed. So, I see the archs hanging around for quite some time, and if for no other reason than they do certain things very well and their OSes run best on them. There is no plan to take IRIX to Intel, they will prolly look at 64-bit linux, but that's about it, and it may or may not be the flagship. I don't see Sun using Intel outside of trying to attract new laptop customers into the OS, or new customers, period. I also think that HP feels that they are enough to keep PA-RISC around, but that is just what I hear from my sources at HP, they like the OS and they have invested a lot in the architecture, their name in Intel circles is MUD, but I don't know how the whole merger deal will turn out. I will say that if they drop HP-UX, you will see a LOT of businesses scrambling, and I don't think HP will let that happen to their market share, especially if they know that a lot of those clients will switch to Sun as opposed to buy Linux, even from HP. That's just the facts of corporate IT, and sad as it is, it's true. The company I work for would rather not change from what they use now, but if they had to, they'd look for another partner like HP, and not one that was peddling something that was labeled in the trade rags as "almost" ready for the data center. I jsut see that as too big of a market for HP to lose. Gracias, mbutler Getting people to build boxes around a chip is nowhere near as tough -- I think that could be done. But big money has big inertia. HP killed off PA-RISC to deal with the Compaq merger, and Alpha's gone too.