Itanium, Rock and the rest ...

Ashlee Vance of Register writes about the code name soup at the Itanium department over there at Intel. It´s more of this “but the next version will kill them all”-stuff we hear every year in similar fashion. But when you read the article to the end, there are some really interesting quotes in it:

We fail to see how IBM will be competitive come 2009/10 unless Power7 brings with it a major change in design philosophy.

and

Sun has pegged late 2008 for Rock shipments. You have to believe it will miss that date if history is any kind of teacher. If, however, Sun can hit the target, it would appear to take a one-year lead in the massively multi-core race.

And, when i take into consideration what i know about the project, we will hit the target …