Business 2.0: Hammer vs. Itanium 2; Comments, critique?

[fbg1]

Here's an interesting article on Hammer vs. Itanium at Business 2.0. Most of it covers the past 20 years history of Intel and AMD and the PC microprocessor market, and the general issues both companies face in bringing 64 bit chips to market. However, the last page has an interesting commentary and comparison of the performance of the two chips. According to this comparison, the Hammer chip stacks up very well against Itanium. While it is apparently common knowledge that Hammer will perform better under 32-bit code than Itanium 2, I didn't realize Hammer would so clearly outperform Itanium 2 under 64-bit code as well. But that is what this chart claims. Looks like AMD has a real winner on their hands, if this comparison is true. Of course, B2.0 is by no means a tech mag, so does anyone have any criticism of their Hammer and Itanium performance predictions?

http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,44507,FF.html

 

[pascal]

It is too early to tell how fast it will be with 64bits.

Probably hammer 32bits performance will be 20~30% higher than Athlons at the same core frequency (depending on the Athlon FSB).