Petz,
If I were in Otellini's shoes, my goal would be to do what AMD did - to have a chip that runs both IA-32 and Itanium IA-64 instruction sets.
In case of AMD64 and IA-32, there is a great deal of overlap, and leveraging of silicon resources, which would not be there in Intel's IA-32-64 beast, but at 65nm, or even 90nm, it may not matter.
So the way for Intel to succeed in making IA-64 THE 64 bit instruction set the way 386 instruction set became THE 32 bit instruction set, Intel has to give it away for free, the same way you will get 64 bit mode in Hammers for "free" once Athlon 64 becomes mainstream chip.
So basically, Intel is still at least 2 years away from fielding IA-32-64 chip, so the name of the game is to stall the market for now.
I think Intel will have to reveal its cards in September, to undermine adoption of AMD64. I wouldn't be surprised if they started emitting some vapor about the IA-32-64 beast, so that third parties don't invest in AMD64 support. I am surprised that Intel has not done it yet.
Itanium has this odor to it, that would go away quickly if Intel said that they are going to be selling a chip with IA-64 instruction set for $150 in some near future.
Then, there is a fundamental question if IA-64 is the way to go for computing, if it will deliver performance scaling at the rate as x86 has been able to do. I am not sure. It seems that Intel is hiding an underwhelming core under the blanket of Megabytes and Megabytes of cache.
Joe |
