Sgolds, Re: Intel is trying to have it both ways - serve the market and protect Itanium. It will not work.
Intel outlined a roadmap today of future DP cores and the promise of 2x performance over Xeon at cost parity by 2007. Remember that unlike desktop parts that get refined with multiple steppings, IPF has had performance relative to a step function. Each new design is far ahead of the previous one, and at this rate, it will be outdistancing itself from x86 (and even x86-64) fairly soon. By 2007, the software side will be far more mature. The infrastructure will offer many choices and many platforms. Intel has chosen to support 64-bits on both platforms, and there's no reason to believe that they can't do both. The IPF momentum is hard to ignore. I predict that sales units will double this year with 200k IPF processors sold, and that's still without the benefit of dual core, integrated memory controller, or a scalable processor to processor interface. All the IPF critics are grasping for straws at this point, because Intel has reiterated their Itanium commitment. The critics won't realize that Intel has a killer enterprise CPU until the stock runup has already passed them by.
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