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Intel to Debut its Core "Skylake" Processors at Gamescom 2015

ok let say the 1st 64bit "normal" customer cpu (and affordable ...) ... was AMD ... (and would have been a pure 64 bit transition good? no legacy support? i don't think so :D, so then thanks AMD ;) )

Intel had a 5-6 year 64bit top-down transitional plan. First the Itanium, then Xeons, then Pentiums and so on. AMD jumped the gun and caused a bit of havoc before they could get out the IA64 Xeons (which would have spurred most of the development of IA64 consumer applications). Today you will still get opinions from either side since some would have preferred pure 64bit with any legacy handled by emulation while others liked the more seamless albeit slow transition to 64bit.
 
Itanium was IA-64. Intel had no plans to bring 64-bit to consumers (other than forcing IA-64 on everyone, anyway). AMD introduced AMD64 (x86-64) with Athlon 64 (Clawhammer). Intel introduced EM64T (today called Intel 64) with Xeon (Nocona) and Pentium 4 (Prescott). IA-64 is effectively dead except for the systems that already have them.
 
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Itanium was IA-64. Intel had no plans to bring 64-bit to consumers (other than forcing IA-64 on everyone, anyway). AMD introduced AMD64 (x86-64) with Athlon 64 (Clawhammer). Intel introduced EM64T (today called Intel 64) with Xeon (Nocona) and Pentium 4 (Prescott).

So they had no plans concerning 64bit for consumers, except for the plan to force 64bit for consumers? I don't really know where you're going with that :D

Simply, they had plans for IA64 dominance and AMD really upset those plans.

Wikipedia citing a 2006 TechWorld article,
Although Itanium did attain limited success in the niche market of high-end computing, Intel had originally hoped it would find broader acceptance as a replacement for the original x86 architecture.

University of Washington CS course paper from 2007:
Ultimately, IA64 saw modest market share in the server market and failed to break into the client. Meanwhile, with AMD64, former second-source AMD was able to rise from nearly 0% server market share to, as Weber described, nearly 25% share. Though not a complete failure for Intel, IA64 failed to deliver on its original vision as a replacement for x86.

A little harder is finding the exact information back in 1999-2001 detailing their top-down approach for the replacement of x86 (Itanium > Xeon > Pentium). I remember this as it was a very exciting time. Can probably go through my boot magazines if I can't find an Anandtech, ARS, or Tomshardware article from back then. Intel of course never got to IA64 Xeon stage because with the first Itanium doing so poorly and AMD's announcement being so hopeful (good 64 and 32bit performance) they decided on making EMT64T Xeons instead.



Not to tread too far off-topic, I am looking forward to Skylake. More for the chipsets than anything else. Get me a moderately-priced H170 ITX board with an i5-6600! More than enough lanes there for an Ultra M.2 (why isn't it called M.4? Ughh....)
 
You mean Core 2 / Conroe?



Completely untrue, because today's CPUs do far more with far less power than the CPUs of yesteryear. Example: the Athlon 64 3200+ is a single-core design that consumes 89W and was released in 2003. The Celeron J1800 is a dual-core that consumes 10W and was released in 2013. The Celeron outperforms the Athlon while consuming far less power - in other words, it took 10 years to lower the power consumption by a factor of 10. That's pretty damn impressive any way you look at it.

Not to mention you can only do so much with silicone, and we're still on x86. I don't think our cpus would have been a million times faster than they are now even if all those old players were active. Look at AMD/Nvidia and how they've been stuck on 28nm and they have every incentive to make things as fast as possible. Plus avarage joes (and even me) do not need anything faster than the old core 2 cpus, plus they're interested in phones and tablets these days, not Pentiums and Athlons.
 
So they had no plans concerning 64bit for consumers, except for the plan to force 64bit for consumers? I don't really know where you're going with that :D
IA64 is completely unrelated to x86-64. x86 will not run on IA-64 and visa versa.

AMD, by launching x86-64, tied Intel's hands. x86-64 did pretty much everything IA64 did but also maintained backwards compatibility. Intel knew IA64 was done at that point so they rushed to slap EM64T on Pentium 4 chips.


I'm planning on buying a Skylake-S 6700 ASAP.
 
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