I_banker, takes more than AMD64. Look at how poorly 4P Xeon machines perform. They need the memory controller on-die, NUMA and an interconnect technology. And of course, even the 1P system needs to be competitive. And how far away are they? Nocona? Or not until 2005 in Tejas?
As for AMD wanting to avoid this at all costs, I don't follow you.
The only realistic alternative was an incompatible 64b x86, which I'm sure Intel would've preferred (thank you Microsoft), and would've spelled the end of AMD. Intel was not about to blunder about *forever* trying to sell Itanium while AMD took the entire Xeon market. It's just a demo. The average time from IDF demo to launch is close to a year, based on previous products. Might be different this time, I suppose. We'll have to wait and see. But it's clearly not in desktop Prescott.
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