Maybe there is nothing wrong that next-gen Itanium will be a little bit faster than Opteron. Otherwise customers will think that AMD is cheating somehow, and something important is missing. And it will be a pricing nightmare as well. AMD is interested to keep Opteron in the Xeon MP price range. They will feel very stupid if they price it at 30% with 100% of performance of equivalent Intel cpu.
Maybe 10% slower and 3 times cheaper is exactly the success story?
Good point about the market. Although Itanium does seem to be headed to dominate a particular sub-niche within the scientific computing niche. Which shouldn't really be a surprise-- that was EPIC's design goal, back in the early 90's when it was set.
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