A NOTE FROM analyst Rick Whittington at AmTech to his clients said Intel will "soon unveil" a 64-bit X86 processor. But, claimed Whittington, it will take Intel nearly a year to build support in the way of motherboards, chipsets and graphics accelerators for such a device. That, he claimed, will leave 2004 "wide open" for AMD.
But, reckons Whittington, such a move by Intel would freeze AMD"s momentum as customers wait and see how the chip giant deals with such an announcement. Additionally, said Whittington, even though Intel"s "cache laden" Extreme Edition version of the P4 may well be migrated to 90 nanometers, such chips have a 3X die size compared to an ordinary Pentium 4 and 2X to a 130 nano Athlon 64. The Itanium, claims AmTech, is in for a "rough ride" but Intel now says it will "go with the market" on 64-bit X86. So such a chip could be delivered in volume in 2005.
That move would ghettoise the Itanium to low volume high end computing solutions. Whittington says Intel"s statement that it will "deliver whatever processing solutions the customer requires" has to be taken in context with the hundreds of millions it"s spent on the Itanium.