Hewlett-Packard Co is predicting its Intel Corp-based Merced systems will deliver 5-to-15 fold improvement over today’s single box servers which maxout at around 35,000 instructions per minute. The company says it expects to be introducing servers which handle 100,000 instructions per minute by the year 2000. Meantime, HP’s been baiting the water with talk of Pervasive Solutions Foundation technologies; the microprocessor, systems design, operating systems, compilers and middleware that will form the foundation of its Merced systems. HP’s spin comes ahead of the campaign Intel is likely to begin cranking up around Merced later this summer even though Merced processors won’t be around in anything but sample quantities for a couple of years.