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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: g_w_north who wrote (68932)	1/25/2002 6:25:05 PM
From: Gopher Broke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

They certainly make it sound easy to just include an x86-64 instruction set on the PIV. Because there is a whole lot of hot air and very little substance behind all the rubbish people are currently posting about the rumour. Just how well is a P4 going to compare to a Hammer, if Intel choose to patch a 64 bit front end onto the 32 bit core? It would suck big time. Any serious Hammer competition would have to be a brand new core. Designing a new core has always taken several years, and a x86-64 core looks to be no different. Not as big as Itanium certainly, but probably as much effort as the P4 was. AMD have been at it for several years already and their engineers are no slouches. (Certainly on a par with Intel IMO) So if Intel takes this route then they are a couple of years behind Hammer, even assuming they have been at it for a year already. As for pursuing a non-x86-64 compatible solution, I doubt that they would go that route. If they are a couple of years behind AMD, it would be a disaster to face resistance to a non-compatible solution and then have to start work on a compatible version. Perhaps they are learning that such arrogance may not be the best policy? What surprises me is that people feel threatened by this development. It was inevitable that Intel would have to develop something new as an answer to Hammer. Itanium was never going to fill that position and P4 is hampered by its design flaws. Yet Intel kept on hoping/dreaming and left it really, really late to switch horses. They are not going to cede the entire market without putting up some resistance, but they may have left it too late already.