So many things to respond to in this thread. Ok...here goes. I agree with pretty much everything Waccoon said in the post not far above this one, so I won't waste time repeating it. I'll just add information.
You are confusing the architecture with the instruction set, up until now most cpus used the x86 32 bit code, that was created by intel. Intel just recently announced that it was scrappin the Intanium 64 bit instruction set and going with the AMD64(thats just the name of the codes) instruction set.
That is just plain wrong. Intel added 64 bit extensions to Xeon processors. IA64 is still going strong, with HP and Intel pushing it everywhere they can. I am an SE for a Sun reseller (keep your sympathy ;-)) and word on the street is that they are practically giving the Itanium boxes away to large accounts just to get them in use. Given your handle here, I'm a little surprised that you seem to be unaware of how well the Itanium performs in certain big-ironish applications. Its main problem is coding complexity and the enormous expense of the boxes. In addition, Intel didn't learn all the lessons taught to it by the Xeons ie, bus bottlenecks. The Opteron *excels* here in many ways, the architecture is designed so that I/O bus capacity and, especially, memory bus capacity scales up as you add more processors. This is quite the opposite of the way a Xeon box handles more processors. I've got fairly in-depth knowledge of the system architectures in Sun's 2-way, upcoming 4-way and 8-way Opteron offerings...they are quite similar to the way Ultrasparc systems are designed, bus-wise. The important thing to remember about Xeons with 64 bit extensions is they still suffer from all the bus bottlenecks...they adopted ONLY the 64 bit extensions, and none of benefits of the new bus architecture. Itanium even suffers from several of these bottlenecks relative to Opteron.
I heard about that, too. There's a lot of give and take between those two companies, and they have agreements not to sue each other over stuff like this. It's nothing new. It makes you wonder if x86 will ever undergo the same treatment as Sparc.
If you are referring to the SPARC consortium, there is at least a HyperTransport consortium, of which AMD (obviously), Sun, and I think HP and IBM are members. Not quite like the SPARC but it's something.
I loved my Amiga, and my C=64 before that...but when C= went under I admit I quickly jumped ship. And now, although it is very interesting I just don't see myself buying an Amiga One or a Peg. The community still interests me as proven by lurking here for quite some length of time, and I run EUAE on Linux pretty often. Seeing the prices of semi-modern hardware like PPC accelerator cards makes me feel like I made the right choice -- for myself. I don't begrudge those who are still enjoying their new and classic Amigas.
Well that's it, back into the cave I go...I had some posts on the old a.org but I doubt anyone remembers me *mutters and shuffles off*
Failure
