Intel concedes 64-bit race to AMD
Posted by Matthew on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @11:49PM
from the we're-going-to-yamhill dept.
Matthew writes: In a gracious speech in Wisconsin this morning, Intel has conceded the 64-bit race to AMD, admitting that there was no way that consumers were actually going to wait for its Itanium line of 64-bit processors to become competitively fast or popular.
“We ran a good race. We ran a hard race. I’m exceptionally proud of the team that we put together. But the results are in, and it’s clear that the momentum is behind AMD and their Opteron.”
“What we’ve got to remember is that this race isn’t about the Itanium vs. the Opteron vs. the G5, it’s about 64-bits vs. 32. That’s why we’re proud to jump on the AMD bandwagon and put our support behind the Opteron 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture. I want everyone who donated their time to watching our campaign, who wished for an Itanium future, to put their support behind Opteron now. We’ve got to unseat the incumbent 32-bit designs if we’re going to move into the future of computing, and it’s more important to move forward with the 64-bit front-runner than it is to split hairs about which architecture would have been superior. Yes, Itanium was a great design and it would have been nice if things could have gone that way, but it just wasn’t compatible with the software of too much of the buying public. Opteron is bringing software compatibility into the future.”