There have been many rumors that Intel may eventually abandon Itanium and adopt AMD's strategy to extend the X86 architecture to 64 bits. This website provides commentary on news and rumors relevant to that topic.

Just in case it isn't obvious: This is a personal website which has no relationship with Intel. The contents are purely speculative and do not purport to represent inside knowledge of Intel's plans.

January 2004

Intel flips, then flops, then flips back. George Alfs, an Intel PR spokesman, has this to say about X86-64:

While, he said, rumours have been "going on" about that for years, Intel hasn't confirmed it.

But, he said, tellingly, Intel thinks about a lot of things and would have to "seriously consider it" and "wait for the right time".

December 2003

Intel denies existence of a 64-bit X86 chip

Confusion in Santa Clara? One official PR representative confirms the existence of a 64-bit CPU and the following week another spokesperson claims it was a misquote.

When asked for clarification, an Intel’s spokespersons said: “the Intel PR person was misquoted... So we have not confirmed a CPU or prototype or whatever IBD claimed.”

Intel has publicly confirmed the existence of a 64-bit X86 chip!

Intel spokesman Robert Manetta says the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker has a working prototype of a 64-bit x86 design that it could bring to market "when customers request it."

Though it's the x86 expert, Intel would need time to ramp up to make the chip and the things that go with it, such as circuit boards and chipsets. "The transition, if it happened, would take time," said Intel's Manetta.

Rick Whittington, a semiconductor analyst at AmTech, claims that Intel will "soon unveil" a 64-bit X86 processor.

The Inquirer - Intel's 64-bit X86 "on the way"

X-bit follows up on the previous report with more details.

X-bit Labs - Intel's x86-64 Technology Confirmed?

The Register gets in on the action too.

"Our research suggests Itanium is in for a rough ride," Whittington writes in a recent research note. "Intel is now saying it will "go with the market" on 64-bit x86, thus is destined to unveil one when they think the market will ripen, which we judge as mid-2004 for volume delivery in 2005.

Looks like Mr Whittington has stirred up a hornet's nest of activity. Mark Boslet of the Dow Jones newswire does a follow-up as well.

The conjecture in the semiconductor industry is that Intel Corp. will have to add 64-bit technology to its 32-bit Pentium chips to keep pace with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. This belief was reinforced Tuesday when Rick Whittington, an analyst at American Technology Research, said in a research note he believes such a chip could make its debut in late 2004.

Mr. Whittington said customers are requesting 64-bit capabilities right now, not in two or three years.

The failure of Intel to sell a Pentium with 64-bit technology could push more business to AMD, which has introduced 64-bit chips for desktops and low-cost servers in the past eight months.

...

Mr. Whittington, who doesn't own Intel stock and whose firm does no banking business with the company, expects to see the first Pentium with a 64-bit extension by the end of 2004 and volume shipments late next year or in 2005. "They can't avoid it," he said. "Otherwise they will give up so much marketshare to AMD."

This is interesting! The Inquirer reports that Intel is working on X86-64. Unfortunately, the article is merely a link to a website in German (which I cannot read.)

The Inquirer - Intel programmers working on X86-64.

October 2003

Linux Business Week reports that Dan Niles, investment analyst for Lehman Brothers, believes that Prescott's 64-bit extensions are incompatible with AMD64.

Linux Business Week - Lehman Thinks Yamhill is Real

Another rumor, possibly related to the Dan Niles story, suggests that Prescott's 64-bit extensions may not be AMD64 compatible after all. There are, unfortunately, no details.

X-bit Labs - Intel Prescott Already Has 64-bit Extensions (But Not AMD64 Compatible)

September 2003

X-bit reports a rumor that Intel's Potomac processor, a future Xeon replacement due in 2H 2004, will support AMD64.

X-bit Labs - Intel Potomac To Support X86-64?

The Inquirer claims Intel's Prescott will support AMD64 because Microsoft will not go to the trouble to support a third 64-bit platform (they already support Itanium.) I agree.

The Inquirer - Why Intel's Prescott will use AMD64 extensions

The Inquirer claims the Intel Tejas (successor to Prescott) will be called the Pentium 5, will be released in mid-2004, and will have a stackable CPU design:

According to this source, and the details have not been confirmed a module sitting on top could provide 64-bit extensions.

And the source claimed, Microsoft is ready to launch a version of Windows called Elements with 64-bit extensions.

The idea seems to be that people can buy a 32-bit module, and then add in the 64-bit processor.

The 64-bit Question

"May you live in interesting times." These are, indeed, most interesting times. Battle lines are being drawn for a epic clash that will determine the future of computing. Companies are betting billions, and even their survival, on predicting how it will unfold. Get it right and immense riches are yours for the taking. Get it wrong and, well, you don't want to think about what happens when you get it wrong.

We have four major competitors vying for conquest of our 64-bit future. Let's look at each.

We will start with the easy one first- the partnership of Apple and IBM with the Power Mac G5 machines. IBM makes the CPUs; Apple provides the rest. The G5 is a competent 64-bit processor in its own right and a close second in performance to AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64. It can only run Windows software through emulation and this, by itself, is enough to put it out of the running for mainstream adoption. Mac users will love it but it is doomed to be a success in its own small niche.

Intel and partner Hewlett-Packard have spent years and billions of dollars creating the Itanium. Itanium's EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architecture is new and proprietary. If Intel pulls it off they will be able to monopolize the CPU business indefinitely-- permitting only competitors of their choosing and setting their own price for licensing rights to the architecture. With a reward like this Intel has every incentive to do whatever it takes to make it succeed. But despite all their efforts, and much to their frustration, the marketplace has stubbornly refused to embrace the Itanium. Intel puts a brave face on it and each time there is a new release in the Itanium family they claim that it will be the one to finally succeed. It never happens and, in my opinion, it never will.

There are two reasons for Itanium's failure. First, EPIC is a poor architecture for modern CPUs. The problem, and this is a killer, is in the size of the instructions. EPIC offloads much of the logic to the code generation phase. The idea is to let the code generator do some of the scheduling and instruction ordering work the CPU would normally do thus making the CPU's job easier and faster. The downside is this preprocessing requires substantially more code space than comparable instructions in other architectures. By the way- this is one of the same problems that doomed VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) of which EPIC is a derivative. This flaw is sufficient to spoil the whole show. EPIC was conceived long ago when memory speeds and CPU speeds were at a parity. Requiring more memory to get the same job done didn't seem like such a bad idea but today we have CPUs that vastly outrun memory and the penalty for halting the CPU to access memory amounts to a loss of hundreds or even thousands of instructions. Old father time has passed EPIC by though Intel still isn't willing to concede defeat. In an effort to address the memory problem Intel has been increasing the cache size on each successive release. An upcoming version of Itanium will have- get ready for this! -a mind-boggling nine megabytes of cache! It won't be enough to make Itanium a success. I don't want to make it sound as if Itanium is all bad though. Its floating-point performance is astonishingly impressive. That's commendable but not enough to compensate for its flaws.

The second problem dooming Itanium is the same one the G5 suffers from- backward compatibility. Intel has addressed this problem too but the result is unsatisfactory. 32-bit performance, though better than emulation, is still far from leading edge. It's as if a 32-bit processor was tucked away in a dark corner of the 64-bit CPU. The architectures are radically different and there is no smooth upgrade path for customers wanting to gradually migrate from 32 bits to 64.

In the end, Intel and Hewlett-Packard have spent billions of dollars and years of effort on a processor with poor 32-bit performance, uneven 64-bit performance and an expensive price tag. I have tremendous respect for these companies but in my best analysis this processor is doomed to fail.

Next comes AMD. AMD has taken a different approach with their Opteron and Athlon 64 family of CPUs. They stretched the existing Intel 32-bit architecture to 64 bits and christened it AMD64. The great advantage of this approach is it starts with a proven (and popular) architecture, preserves ideal backward compatibility, offers excellent performance, and provides a perfectly smooth transition path to 64 bits. This is, from the standpoint of the customer, The Right Thing To Do. All is good, right? Well, not quite. AMD made a couple of costly missteps when they got clever and decided to design in a new bus, integrate the memory controller into the CPU and manufacture it on a new process called SOI (Silicon On Insulator.) The potential to reduce memory latencies, improve SMP performance, increase clockspeeds and lower operating temperatures was too sweet to resist but it was too much to bite off at once. Working the bugs out of the new process caused Opteron to be delayed by a year and while most of the technical risks paid off it did not realize the hoped-for clock speed improvements. AMD should have simply added 64-bit support to their existing Athlon CPU and shipped it a year sooner while they worked on the new, risky technologies for future processor generations. That would have been the boring but entirely sensible thing to do. Perhaps in the end it will work out for the best but it cost AMD valuable time. Still, Intel is nowhere to be seen. AMD is shipping today, the AMD64 architecture is sound and its price-to-performance ratio is unbeatable. Congratulations, AMD.

There is yet one more competitor to examine and it is.....drum roll please......Intel!

Yes, I mentioned Intel already but bear with me. Intel isn't stupid. You don't get to be as big and successful as Intel by missing the obvious and failing to have a backup plan if Itanium should fail. I believe their next-generation Pentium processor, code-named Prescott, contains support for 64-bit instructions. I suspect, though I can't be certain (and AMD isn't forthcoming on this question), that Intel has a cross-licensing agreement that gives them rights to the AMD64 instruction set. If this is true Intel could flip a switch and turn on support for AMD64 instantly at a time of their choosing. Prescott will be released on December 3 and will be in volume shipments in the first quarter of 2004 which will put it just in time for Microsoft's release of Windows XP 64-bit edition.

Time for even more rampant speculation as to how the future will play out. AMD will have the 64-bit market effectively to themselves into the first half of next year. They will be able to command high prices although it will be tempered somewhat by initially low supply volumes. Assuming the tech sector recovery continues it should be enough to help AMD reach profitability. Meanwhile, Intel management has given Itanium one last chance to prove itself. If it fails to catch on once Windows XP 64-bit edition ships, or perhaps even by the launch, they will flip the switch to enable 64-bit instructions and declare their presence. Intel is too stubborn to admit failure with Itanium. Instead they will reaffirm their support for it as the processor for scientific workstations and declare they never really intended it for the desktop anyway. It will simply fade away.

The more things change the more they stay the same. By this time next year Intel will still be on top with defacto leadership in 64-bit desktop computers simply due to AMD's inability to ship in volume. AMD, benefitting from a combination of higher ASPs (Average Selling Prices) due to better penetration in 64-bit server and workstation markets, the cost-cutting discipline of Hector Ruiz and improved economic conditions, should return to profitability and enjoy increased stature in the industry for leading the way in 64-bit computing.

There are some wildcards that could have a major effect on the outcome. It would be a colossal blunder if Intel attempts to force AMD out of the market by creating their own incompatible instruction set. The smart thing to do is adopt AMD64 and show up at the party fashionably late but in great volume. Maybe add a few extra instructions to be a superset of AMD64 just to tweak AMD's nose. If they insist on incompatibility it will set them back (Windows won't be ready for it) and will effectively hand CPU leadership over to AMD. One other thing to keep an eye on is AMD's close collaboration with IBM. IBM is a pioneer in SOI technology and has been instrumental in helping AMD solve their process problems. The relationship between these two companies looks even more cozy as AMD is apparently moving their CPU design team to Fishkill, NY to live and work under the same roof as IBM. It will be interesting to see where this relationship leads. It is not inconceivable to me that IBM may one day acquire AMD. Another wildcard with Intel is heat output with the 90nm Prescott. No one understands how to climb the learning curve better than Intel but they are having serious and unexpected problems with heat generation that could hamper them in raising their clock speeds. This could be a critical competitive issue if AMD/IBM can increase speeds faster.

We truly do live in interesting times.

The Inquirer gets another source for the rumor that Prescott has 64-bit support. I am convinced that it does as well. The critical questions are:

What instruction set does it run? It could be AMD64 if Intel has the rights to this instruction set. Intel and AMD have a long-standing cross-licensing agreement but I have not yet gotten confirmation that it extends to AMD64.

When will Intel reveal the 64-bit extensions? This one is easier: They will reveal it when they abandon hope that Itanium will succeed. I don't expect anything from them through the end of this year but if the Athlon64 proves to be a success the pressure within Intel will be strong.

The Inquirer - Prescott has 64-bit compatibility built in

The Inquirer wonders if the extra pins required for the upcoming Intel Tejas processor are required for 64-bit support.

The Inquirer - Intel black shirts hint at 64-bitness of Tejas

August 2003

The chip giant, she says, has got so far ahead with Potomac that it's decided to call it Xeon 64 inside.

Seeking to fend off a sudden charge from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), Intel Corp. is still working on its code-named "Yamhill" technology for 32/64-bit processor designs, according to a report from investment banking firm American Technology Research Corp.

"Any 64-bit variant of P5 [is] not in evidence until 2005," but the "Yamhill" technology "would seem to present the only real challenge to AMD's Athlon 64, which should more or less enjoy the power desktop by itself in H1 2004," according to the report.

July 2003

Robert McMillan of IDG News Service has an enlightening interview with Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and creator of "Moore's Law", regarding the future of the X86 architecture. There's nothing specific about Intel's plans, and Mr. Moore is speaking his own opinions, but it's nonetheless revealing.

IDGNS: The x86 architecture is now about 25 years old. Did you expect it to last this long?

Moore: It's really evolved considerably over that 25 years. We've added a lot of stuff. We took advantage of essentially all the new inventions of the computer architects and academic communities. It carries some baggage, but the baggage is not that bad. That baggage lets us run all the historical applications, which is really an important thing.

I think it's going to be around for a long, long time. It's hard for me to envision circumstances that would be appropriate to abandon it right now. If somebody made completely hardware-independent software, maybe. But then you'd still have to go back and take the tens of thousands of programs, the legacy stuff, and convert them. I don't think that's going to happen. I think the compatibility is such a powerful asset for the typical user, it's going to keep the Intel architecture around for the foreseeable future.

IDGNS: Its success seems to be, in part, holding back Intel's own Itanium processor.

Moore: They are really aimed at different markets. Itanium really doesn't depend much on legacy software, and it really is a big-machine-oriented architecture. It may find its way onto the desktop too, If people really want to go that way, but I'm a little skeptical. We'll have to wait and see.

IDGNS: How much longer will x86 be around? Do you think it will last another 25 years?

Moore: It will still be around when we dig up the time capsule.

Intel is rumored to be considering adding 64-bit instructions to Tejas, Prescott's successor:
The Inquirer - Is Intel still toying with 64-bit desktop chips?

May 2003

The interesting point about the following article is that Intel does not question the architecture of the Opteron:

"The Opteron hasn't been properly evaluated and lacks software and tools that new CPUs require."

April 2003

Chip Architect - Looking at Intel's Prescott die, part II

March 2003

Chip Architect - Intel's Prescott: The clues for Yamhill
The Inquirer - Intel secret X86-64 project still on the go

January 2003

IDG - Intel may release new Xeon processor in 2004

September 2002

The Inquirer - Intel burns AMD-clone Yamhill idea

August 2002

The Inquirer - Intel's Yamhill still not a lost cause?

June 2002

The Inquirer - Intel won't produce AMD clone – Otellini
The Inquirer - Intel's AMD X86-64 clone, doggone it
ChipGeek - Yamhill alive and well in Prescott
Van's Hardware - Intel To Dump Yamhill?
Xbit Labs - Intel and Yamhill: To Be or Not To Be?

February 2002

Silicon Strategies - At ISSCC, Intel outlines McKinley 64-bit processor, but remains mum on 'Yamhill'

January 2002

Silicon Strategies - Intel hedges bets in 64-bit MPU market with 'Yamhill' technology, says report
The Register - Intel's Yamhill - Itanic on ice?