It hasn’t been easy to get HP’s specifics on what is being dropped from its list of promises about the computer, but the company’s Web pages are more explicit than any other message. Sure, it’s easy to see that IA-64 support wasn’t going to surface, but HP had put that project on such a back burner nobody expected it before the middle of this decade. With the end of support announcement from HP, though, came word that 6-way and 8-way versions of the N-Class have been scrapped, too. The N-Class chassis carries eight processor bays for PA-RISC CPUs, and the current product line only supports as many as four under MPE/iX. You only have to go back to the fall of 2000 to find an HP promise on future N-Class systems that supported more processors than the N-Class’ original roll-out. If there’s a silver lining in any of these changes to HP’s plans, it’s in the PA-8700; general manager Winston Prather said he was pretty sure that faster processor, not being used in any HP 3000 yet, would be implemented in the next release of A-Class systems, as well as the N-Class. We’ll stay tuned to see if that future comes true.