Intel will can Itanic if boy Hammer does too well

We have beleived and have written for maybe two years that Intel is tirelessly working on its own version of X86-64 technology just in case two awful things happen - sales of its Itanic processor don't get any better, and sales of AMD's Hammer/Clawhammer ramp up alarmingly.

Now the Mercury News has picked up on this story and amplified Intel's plans.

According to a story up there, and based on an engineer, who quite sensibly declines to be named, the "Yamhill Technology" which is essentially based on X86-64 features, will be built into allegedly 32-bit chip Prescott with the option to turn the code on or off, depending on how well the Intel folk think sales of Itanic are still crap, and sales of Hammer are very good.

As we have reported before, the work is going on in Ronler Acres and we can assure you that if Intel has to bite the bullet and dump Itanic, it will do so.

The newspaper says that the Itanium has cost Intel $1 billion over the seven (actually eight) years it's been in the making, but we believe the true figure is higher than that.

For Intel to have a backup plan is sensible and in line with its past behaviour. In addition, Intel virtually owns the server X86 market right now, with large corporations and big PC vendors all standing in an obedient line. That doesn't have to be the case forever, but the firm which has to prove itself to corporate buyers is AMD, not Intel.

The last roadmaps we saw from Intel in December have Madison, too, as a real product available in 2003.

Don't forget, by the way, AMD's X86-64 site, which is there to sustain open source developers interested in its backward compatible 64-bit architecture.

X86-64 code is not proprietary and we believe the instruction set is also open source, allowing Intel to freely use it. The instructions in the Itanium are definitely not in the same category.

News source: The Inquirer