imho I sound happy, isn't that very clear
Itanium is a joke and will be lucky to sutrvive as a niche product. You also seem to forget 3 or 4 years ago when the Intel faithful where claiming Itanium would be brought to the masses, such as desktop and even notebook, boy how that was a farce. the bottom line is AMD is ramping up it's volume of A64 and Opteron which means more high end bucks going AMD's way and not Intel's. There is also the fact that AMD domiantes the benchmarks on 32 bit, if anything it will be even moreso on 64bit because Prescott has a slower bus than AMD's Hypertransport, plus AMD's on chip memory controller also is a big advantage. Intel is likely to only be further behind on 64 bit which is great for AMD. Throw in all the thermal problems Intel is having with Prescott and it shows Intel has hit a major pothole. Intel must hope the D0 stepping of Prescott is much better or AMD is going to take the high end away from Intel all together as volume ramps. As far as MSFT in Intel's pocket, dream on, MSFT is far more dominant than Intel. Case in point, MSFT told Intel that they would have to follow AMD's standard on X86-64 since they were not interested in doing multiple Operating Systems. So now your theory on Intel bossing MSFT around has been torn to shreds. I predict the Intel faithful will probably post less as the year goes on because for Intel it's not going to be pretty. For AMD there could be some very significant profits. Cha-ching Cha-ching Cha-ching.
