Hewlett-Packard Co has identified a further two members of its Precision Architecture RISC family that will extend the life of native PA-8000 boxes well into the next decade for those users who dont wish to make the transition to systems HP is building around the Intel Corp Merced part. One will be formally announced in 1999, the other in the year 2000; they will show up in systems 12 to 18 months later. The most recent addition to the line is the PA-8500, expected to debut in systems around mid-1998 (CI No 2,960). The news raises yet more speculation about the likely availability of systems built upon Merced, which uses an IA-64 RISC instruction set Intel co-designed with HP. Recent reports suggested that Intel had pushed Merced deliveries back to 1999 from 1998 though HP claims it has only ever talked about the availability of Merced systems by the year 2000. Ironically, news of the two further PA-8000 family members emerged from a meeting addressed by systems technology chief Rich Sevcik which HP called to try and counteract what it claims is the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) being spread by rivals such as DEC, IBM and Sun suggesting HP is abandoning Unix for NT, and about the supposed difficulty users will face moving applications from PA-RISC to Merced. HP says it will announce six-way SMP Unix systems using the PA-8200 within four weeks time (CI No 3,109), along with eight-way Windows NT-based Intel servers. It will also have NT up on Intels Pentium II processor – the Pentium Pro with MMX multimedia extensions formerly known as Klamath.