I'm referring to the short term strategy (next 1-2 years). My main evidence is the sort-of condescending phrase that a Sun representative used to refer to Intel's 64-bit extensions to be impemented on Prescott during 2004. He called it "something called a 64-bit extension."
If you look at Prescott, if you look at some of the new (chips)--in particular some of those coming up in 2004--Intel's very quietly putting something called a 64-bit extension in. news.com.com
First, if Intel was implementing AMD64, he could have just said, "Intel will do the same thing in 2004" or "Intel will implement AMD64." End of story.
BTW, the way he described the chip as a Prescott to be implemented during 2004, its plain he isn't talking about the initial Prescott, since that chip was scheduled for 2003 (and, officially, still is, even now) when the article was written.
So its clear that Intel's Prescott 2 extension is NOT AMD64. I don't see a major marketing challenge with 64-bit data/32 bit addressing extensions. A bunch of benchmarks will run faster on their pseudo-64-bit CPU than they do on a P4. In fact, they'll probably do just as well as the same software written for AMD64, and that includes games and media applications. In short, Intel advertising will emphasize the speedup involved rather than making bold claims about it being "a 64-bit CPU." Its hard to imagine Intel losing a marketing battle with AMD, isn't it?
4 other reasons --
(1) It wouldn't hurt Itanium,
(2) it wouldn't cost much for Microsoft to support it,
(3) there is precedent (PNI, SSE2, SSE) for Microsoft to support it and
(4) it would not violate Intel's pledge to support only AMD64 and Itanium for a comprehensive 64-bit architecture.
1.5 to 2 years from now, maybe Intel will support AMD64, or maybe they'll try to make Itanium cheaper.
I'm apparently the only person on the planet that thinks this is a possibility, so take it with a grain of salt.
Petz |
