I had an interesting lecture this morning by a guy from Intel about the Pentium 4, the Itanium, and...

I had an interesting lecture this morning by a guy from Intel about the Pentium 4, the Itanium, and chip design in general. I really can say I have a much better sense of how my computer works now, almost filling the gaps between the 0s-and-1s world and programming languages. One of the things he said was that Itanium is aimed at the "high end of the server market". Which implies that Pentium 4 is not going to be the last pentium, and makes this article about Transmeta allying with AMD a lot more interesting. Basically, the Itanium and AMD's latest offering are both 64-bit, but AMDs architecture is still backward-compatible with the all-encompassing x86 family, while Itanium requires significant redevelopment of most software. Of course, it may all be a moot point if the next version of Windows runs (as seems likely) on Itanium; developers will flock to it. But I'm not sure how pleased the Linux community will be about that, you might end up with *nix running on the x86ish boxes while Windows flavours go to Itanium-style boxes, rather like Windows vs. Mac -- different software AND hardware, making porting even more of a nightmare. This could be either very good or very bad for Linux, depending what the bulk of developers end up using. I have a feeling the Itanium stuff might be a bitch to code, but what do I know?