Haddock,
It seems clear that the difficult thing is porting to 64 bits, not porting to one specific architecture or another.
Not exactly. Actually, not even close: Optimizing for the high degree of parallelism in EPIC design is the most difficult part of Itanium porting. If you try to run Itanium code written as if it were a simple 64-bit port, much of the processor will be starved for execution and sit idle. You will have a very, very slow 800MHz processor.
Opteron, however, is designed to run x86 code fast after a simple port to 64-bit. There is more optimizing to be done for AMD64 to fully shine, but nothing compared to Itanium.
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