Chipguy, from previous posts you overestimated introduction frequencies for Merced, Mckinley, Madison, Montecito, and now probably Montvale too. So why trust Tukwila? Isn't it starting to look like this redesigned Tukwila might be the last Itanium? I mean Intel did talk about converging Itanium and Pentium in the past. Isn't it more likely now that if the convergence does take place that the x86 line of cpu architectures is the one that will be continued? Much more capital is invested in the x86 architecture than in Itanium + PA RISC + Alpha architectures combined. The x86 architecture is moving upwards fast with virtualization and mainframe class chipset plans. Momentum of x86 has not slowed in all the years now that Itanium is on the market, as Itanium only replaces older architectures whose development funds were minimized years ago. SUN meanwhile is only likely to get more close to AMD (Galaxy, shared developments) up till at least their more general purpose Niagara derivative called Rock. HP is likely increasingly cursing its Itanium bed partner internally (as they were clearly expecting Montecito to clock between 2 and 2.5GHz, and Montvale between 2.5 and 3GHz - not unlike you). IBM is highly emphasizing Power over other architectures they ship such as Itanium and is set to continue doing that because they are not likely to be challenged sufficiently. And where is the Itanium buzz this IDF? Why did HP discontinue Itanium workstations a while back? Why are engineers recently reportedly taken off Itanium development in favor of x86 development? Also, why don't we have any Itanium code names for 45nm, while we do have at least some of them for x86?
So what exactly is it that makes you think all is about right on target and getting better with Itanium?
Regards,
Rink
