Re: Alas, I guess it would be considered unfair to compare quicksort on 64-bit integers in legacy and in long mode?
Those guys are all in shock, and we can forgive a little babbling on their part.
Sun, whose market share was a nest full of unhatched eggs they'd already counted, is now shipping a killer line of Opteron systems while Itanium sales wilt.
IBM, after their success with a small Opteron server line has just moved Opteron to a full line of workstations and is expanding their server line.
HP, the company that many think did more of Itanium's design than Intel, has announced Opteron workstations and servers.
Intel has basically announced they're frantically working on a clone of AMD's chip, and will ship it if and when they can figure out how to make it.
Cray now has multiple lines of high end Opteron systems, Red Storm and Octiga Bay.
One of Intel's former advantages was that they could supply engineered solutions to white box makers. There are now multiple, fully engineered suppliers of Opteron systems to the white box market, Sanmina/Newisys and Celestica.
Microsoft may be late with a full production version of Windows for AMD64, but they've managed to put NX into the next service pack, giving AMD an easily marketed, obvious advantage over Xeon, Pentium, and Centrino - particularly for the lucrative corporate and government markets.
Intel's process technology, which formerly let them ship chips that used less power, making AMD systems the ones pushing the limits of power supplies, heat sinks, and noise, has flat out collapsed in the move to 90nm, while AMD's "risky" SOI process has been having no such troubles.
Least cost, industry standard system platforms will boot but be unreliable using Pentium (due to just barely adequate inexpensive power supplies) but will be rock solid if the more efficient Athlon 64 is used.
The poor guys are reeling, they don't know what hit them!
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