Sgolds, Re: so you think the x86 product line is crap?
You are confusing the architecture with the design. Designs such as Pentium M are among the finest ever to hit the market, but they are still being held back by an ISA that's more than 2 decades old. Intel has been trying hard to reduce the amount of legacy support; for example, real mode applications and drivers have been wiped out, and the number of applications that use the A20 line for wrapping memory no longer exist for the majority of users. Along with these extinctions goes some of the major drawbacks of the x86 architecture, but many still remain.
Leading these drawbacks is the decode logic necessary to translate x86 instructions into RISC like micro-ops. The variable byte lengths of x86 require a lot of logic and the decoders are slow and take up several pipeline stages. They are among the largest power dissipaters of the chip, and they slow down the overall performance.
Intel should be able to take IPF and make even lower power chips than Banias, and maybe we will see such chips in the Tanglewood time frame. After all, if Intel and the ex-Alpha engineers can make a 16-core chip with the same power dissipation of a current Itanium 2 processor (107W TDP), they should be able to make a quad core version with just under 27W TDP. That would run circles around any processor based on x86.
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