The processor wars

Novakovic argues that despite the turn by AMD to a 64-bit platform, vindicated by the success of the Athlon 64, AMD had better watch out. Intel will be fighting back in 2006 with Merom, Conroe and Woodcrest, as processor design adopts a multicore approach. Even so, life won't be a bed of roses for Intel either. Rumors abound in the industry of the "retirement" of the Intel Itanium, an expensive attempt to break away from the x86 architecture at the high end, and Intel sorely lacks an interconnect that could compete with AMD's HyperTransport.