Bij Sharky Extreme hebben ze een roadmap in elkaar gezet over de toekomstige plannen van Intel voor de server markt, hieronder de samenvatting:
IA-64 - IA-64 is coming, with plenty of potential speed and industry support. The latter half of 2000 and 2001 could turn into a major battle between Sun and Intel for the "big iron" server market. Workstations need servers - If Intel cannot penetrate the 64-bit server market, their workstation sales may suffer as companies choose top to bottom solutions with one architecture. Foster and Colusa - Foster, matched to the Colusa chipset, will replace the Pentium III Xeon. With a similar design to the Willamette, we expect the Willamette:Foster relationship to be similar to the Pentium III:Xeon relationship. Pentium III Xeon Continues - The Pentium III Xeon will increase in speed, remaining the choice for x86 workstations and servers until Foster and the Itanium prove themselves.[break]Naast dit hebben ze ook nog een leuk stukje tekst geschreven over de EPIC architecteur van de IA-64:[/break]The EPIC architecture uses long CPU instructions that resemble multiple RISC instructions strung together. These instructions are run simultaneously down multiple pipelines within the CPU, allowing IA-64 CPUs to compute multiple instructions per clock cycle. The Itanium will be capable of running up to 20 instructions per clock cycle. IA-64 instructions are bundled together when originally compiled, simplifying the process of running multiple instructions at once. In contrast, x86 instructions are compiled serially, so in order to make use of multiple pipelines, the CPU essentially has to predict or guess what can run simultaneously down each of its pipelines. When an x86 CPU is right, multiple instructions get executed per clock. When it is wrong, the extra executed instructions are wasted.