Happy new year to start with. I've been out for a while so a belated response. Reading the SPEC results of the 64-but Hammer made me wonder if AMD still wants to shout the "Megahertz don't matter" around for much longer?
Assuming the spec-results found at spec.org are correct, the Itanic seems to beat the AMD by quite a margin at a lower clock speed?
Considering that Intel will increase the clock on the next model, AMD might have a hard time entering in the high-end workstation/server market. As programs like Sidefx's houdini, and MSC.Software's Nastran are fully ported/supported on the IA-64 platform.
And those are not the only ones. The market that AMD is so keen on, most software is already ported to IA-64 and working fine. If AMD wants to play the game of megahertz don't matter, they will be beaten in the 64-Bit arena by Intel (and IBM for that matter).
Because even if those companies will port the software to AMD's 64-bit interpretation, they'll have to fight the performance battle here. And they are not alone, IBM, Intel and HP all want to keep a slice of that cake!
And even if the AMD is cheaper, the cost of the processor is generally only a small part of the total system and it is a one time investment. The calculations-time is what counts in rendering, FEA or similar.
Source: http://www.theinquirer.net
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