InfoWorld: With great respect, you probably won’t be deciding the outcome of the CPU race; not if your normal shopping list has called for backward-compatible, x86 systems (25 percent faster than the previous years’ models) at about the same cost.

No offense, but you’re not the one who hires technologists to analyze CPU trends and plan four horizons ahead. That task goes to AMD (Profile, Products, Articles), IBM (Profile, Products, Articles), Intel (Profile, Products, Articles), Sun, and other chipmakers. When AMD cast its mind (named Fred Weber) beyond, it saw its clean room x86 trimmed back to its core and built into a shockingly well-designed machine. When IBM looked ahead, it saw ever more powerful Power and PowerPCs. When Sun looked ahead … well, who knows what Sun saw?

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