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Originally Posted by Jason425
hey.. remember itanium?  |
Yeah but the Itanium and Itanium 2 were not designed for the same architecture. Intel has to almost start from scratch for their consumer level 64-bit chips. AMD
has designed the Athlon 64 for the x86 architure so it performs at 100% whereas the Itanium and Itanium 2's perform like they are about 25% of the chip they are when running x86 commands. Any chip maker can make a 64-bit chip; it's designing it to run with existing architectures that takes the R&D. (The R&D that AMD doesn't need from Intel, and the R&D that Intel doesn't even have.)
EDIT: Itanium 2 does have an x86 processor on the chip, however, it is not a full x86 processor implementation and it does not run as fast as it should. Hence Intel provides
software for x86 commands to run almost as fast as if it was the native command set.