Re:AMD Hammer will , HAMMER Itanium , play catchup (Score 2, Interesting)

This maybe be the case to a certain extent, but from the sounds of it the Intel 64-x86 extentions have been in development for quite some time now, they just havn't been talking about it. I'm not so sure they will have to play catch up at all. Also the Yamhill could be a good transistion processor while the IA64 architechure matures. Not to mention the current implementations of IA64 are targeted for high end server applications and not the consumer and low to mid range server market. There is even the possiblity the two could coexist.