thebs writes: “As some of you are aware, Intel has licensed AMD’s x86-64 instruction set. Rumor had it Intel’s competiting chip “Yamhill” was being designed as an ISA (instruction set architecture) compatible version of AMD’s Hammer chip. Now according to this article at TheInquirer, Intel is dropping any x86-64 plans in favor of future IA-64/Itanium-based developments. Maybe Intel is getting the performance it expected out of its forthcoming IA-64 prototypes? Even Itanium2 benchmarks had told me the opposite, at least for general usage — let alone versus the die size of the suckers! I guess we’ll have to see. Source: http://www.vanshardware.com/.”
