Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

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Joe, Re: the biggest advantage Itanium has over the current x86 implementations is the large cache and 2 FP units. 2nd FP unit on x86 processors would instantly eliminate the SPEC_fp advantage that Itanium currently holds.

Very, very unlikely. Simply having the hardware there doesn't mean you can extract the ILP to make full use of it. Otherwise, it would have been a "no-brainer" for Intel to already add it. Furthermore, new execution engines are the second most power hungry units for a processor, right after the decode engine. I really don't think the tradeoffs are as favorable as you may think.