Well, Intel seems to be trying to "wake up" the world public at the current IDF. Besides a new Pentium 4 version, they also showcased the second "iteration" of their 64bit CPUs aka McKinley.
Not so long ago (see February news archive) Intel announced that they had already finished the development of this CPU, and now they managed to show not just the processor but the entire system based on two McKinleys.
Mass manufacturing of the new Itanium version (all 64bit Intel processors will have "Itanium" in their name) is to start in the end of the year. Especially for this processor Intel will introduce a new Intel 870 chipset supporting RDRAM and DDR memory.
So, we dare suppose that the poor Intanium aka Merced will never appear in mass now...