Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

You forget about the IA-32 EL.

I didn't forget. My post mentioned caring about performance of legacy apps.

This problem even exists in the EDA world, where IPF has some backing.

Lets say a company uses all Linux based EDA tools running on x86 today. They use logical verification tools from one company, design capture from another, and routing/physical verification from yet another. As I have seen to date, only 1 or 2 apps in this chain run on IPF, and there is no way the others could be run under IA-32el due to performance concerns. This company has little choice but to stick with an x86 solution until all the apps can run on IPF, or they have to have specialized machines for doing different things. The performance benefit from having a specialized IPF machine is just not worth the extra cost and hassle of supporting multiple platforms.

x86-64 fits better here than IPF until IPF hits the critical mass of apps that the target consumer wants to run. In some areas, IPF already has done this, in others, there is still lots of work to be done.

So I'm not saying there are more x86-64 apps than IPF apps. I'm saying there are a ton more x86-32 apps than IPF apps that are still critical and performance sensitive, where a solution like Opteron works best. If you have enough of these situations, it will be hard for IPF to ever gain traction in the workstation space.