Intel's Merom is not delayed

THERE HAVE BEEN lots of rumours swirling about Merom, Conroe or Woodcrest being late. They are wrong. The chips are on time, and on schedule. The schedule has always been July/August for the best case, September/October for the worst case.

Things are still moving toward the best case dates, but some may be delayed a bit in the worst case. Since Intel is sending out Conroe XEs at 3.33GHz to friends and people buried in NDAs until you can't find any trace of their existence, around the end of this month, we think things are in great shape.

The moral of the story is that shocking revelations of problems are not shocking revelations. People not up to date on the schedules are reading the runes wrongly.

The rumours about Vista taking more power than XP have also been long known and factored in to any TDP measurements, so again this is no big deal. µ