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Facing reality: Intel's secret rival to 64-bit Itanium

Yamhill is reality computing. They don't want to admit it in public: but inside Santa Clara, Intel designers know that their 64-bit super-processor, Itanium, may be the wrong one - and that rival chip designer AMD may have got it right.

Experience in mobile devices shows that this isn't the first time Intel has been forced to admit that its rivals had better processor designs than Santa Clara could provide.

In exactly the same way as Intel was forced to adopt the ARM processor as an alternative for people who were building low-power hand-held devices, it may be forced to come up with an alternative for Itanium, too. But this time, it wants to do the design work itself, not buy it in.

Commentators have been predicting that Intel would have to come up with an "Intel-compatible" 64-bit processor for a year now - ever since the company revealed that its Itanium chip would not run native Pentium code even as fast as a 32-bit Pentium chip.

Intel always said this didn't matter: that 32-bit Pentium 4 chips would provide all the power any desktop user would ever want. "The Itanium will sell to the server market, not the PC user," was the official line. It still is the official line.

Now, according to Silicon Valley newspaper Mercury News, Intel has taken steps to deal with the possibility that its rival, AMD may have got it right by designing a 64-bit "Hammer" chip which would be completely Pentium-compatible.

Reporter Therese Polette says that Intel's way around the problem is to design a new Pentium chip which will include "Yamhill" features - features which can be "turned on" if it needs to be a 64-bit design as well as a 32-bit one.

The problem facing Intel is denied by its software partner, Microsoft, which says it will support the new chip under Windows, with a version of Windows XP available for 64-bit soon.

But in reality, it will be an unprecedented miracle if Microsoft manages to produce an identical XP for both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel architectures.

In the past, it produced a version of Windows NT, which was supposed to run the same software on Apple, MIPS, Digital Equipment Alpha, and Intel chips. Within a short time, the Intel version was the only one left; nobody used the other versions, because software wasn't portable.

To make Windows XP work identically on Pentium and Itanium would be no easier than making it work identically on PowerPC and Pentium. The basic problem lies in getting drivers for devices which attach to the computer - printers, scanners, network cards, displays, and so on. In theory, it can be solved. In practice, it never is; it's always someone else's job to write the drivers.

Conceivably, Microsoft and Intel could make the effort to ensure that every device made for attachment to Itanium is fully supported by compatible drivers that behave in the same way as they do on a Pentium.

In reality, even today, Windows XP doesn't support many devices which work reliably and well under Windows 98 - because there are just too many drivers to write.

AMD's Hammer holds the promise of avoiding this problem. If it does, then Intel needs to be ready with a hammer of its own; and Yamhill is its secret hammer project.

It may be expensive. But compared with the money Intel spent buying the Alpha chip and the StrongArm processor design from Digital Equipment, it would be peanuts. And by comparison with the money ARM stole in the mobile phone business and the pocket PC business, it could be nothing at all.