As customers await the shareholder vote tally in Hewlett-Packard's proposed buyout of Compaq, at least one new-product rollout isn't suffering. Compaq has been busy this week touting its latest high-performance AlphaServers.

The vendor revealed plans Monday to ship the servers--driven by the most powerful processor on the market--to select customers and partners now and to anyone who wants them later this year. However, Compaq wouldn't unveil any server specifications until the servers ship. Compaq is positioning the servers for the most demanding high-performance customers, including those in the biotech, oil and gas, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and mining industries.

But this could be one of the last AlphaServer rollouts. Compaq expects Intel to develop a comparable chip by 2004 that would shut the doors on Alpha chip development in 2005, allowing time for only one more generation of the AlphaServer. Until then, though, Compaq remains poised to ship server systems whose performance will beat competitors, including HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, at the eight-processor level.

"Compaq has a strong base of Alpha users," says Jean Bozman, an International Data Corp. analyst. "The OVMS software running on most of the servers has been out there for 25 years." Bozman has spoken with both Compaq and HP regarding the pending merger and expects the AlphaServer road map to stay on track. The vendor will stop offering it off the shelf in 2005 but will build custom servers for another two years. Support will continue until 2012.