need to know three things about the Itanium to pretty much automatically rule it out

1) Heat (and the related, power consumption). Not a joke, not a rumor. The Itanium makes the Prescott core look cool and energy-efficient by comparison.

2) Not designed to run the software in use by 99.5% of the PC market. Great for a custom supercomputer, okay for some servers, complete shit for normal desktop use.

3) Price. They hope to make it competitive by 2007? How long has it existed now, at 3-10x the price of the highest end x86 CPU? And someone actually needs to ask why it hasn't hit mainstream use yet?

This was post-ed on slahshdot

intel..<<..amd..~..powerpc