HP IS IN A unique position, owning or co-owning three major performance-leading 64-bit architectures - the long-time champion, Alpha, HP's own workhorse, HP-PA, and of course, co-development of IA-64 with Intel.

Officially, both Alpha and PA-RISC are consigned to the dustbin of great things unjustly abandoned, but that's life isn't it? HP is even moving good old VMS to Itanium. HP also supposedly was the major brain behind Itanium2 design and resulting good performance.

So, even if X86-64 wildly succeeded, and Intel ever wavered on its Itanium commitment, HP would have no choice but to take over the further development - chipsets to bring the performance out are the first, obvious target. HP zx1 has superior memory performance to E8870, plus added bells and whistles like AGP for workstations. I wouldn't be surprised to see HP be the first with a chipset for any sped-up FSB on, say, Madison 2.

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First article: 64-bit future scenarios I