Keith, Of course, the real question (that they are trying to avoid in focussing on Itanium) is why not adopting Opteron as a Xeon competitor, which is what it is build for?
HP engineering staff has a lot of chips in the EPIC/Itanium philosophy. They're avoiding focusing on Itanium 'cause they don't like the idea of losing their jobs in the next year or 2 as EPIC and Itanium sink. The more they present AMD64 as a trivial update to X86 the longer they have to pump out Itanium's bilges.
Explicit Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC): EPIC is the old term for what is now known as the Itanium™ processor family architecture, co-developed by HP and Intel®. This design philosophy will one day replace RISC and CISC. It is a gateway into the 64-bit future but it still remains completely 32-bit compatible.
That's somebody's opinion, but it isn't mine for the next 5 years of CPU design.
And Carley's options aren't looking real good right now. How many customer service reps. can they outsource before they start getting rid of compiler engineers?
The big Xeon market is what Opteron is targetting, not the tiny niche I2 currently occupies.
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