[the invisib1e hand]

for the non geeks, a Cliff-notes version would be helpful.

So is does this mean a bad year for Intel, AMD, and MU?

[red-dawg]

[cliff notes] Pretty soon consumers will be able to purchase ONE box that will be
a television/entertainment center + a computer + security system + microwave oven + communication system that will run some form of Windows.
It will cost in the neighborhood of six figures and it will *still* crash into the blue screen of death. [/cliff notes]

[Boundless]

> for the non geeks, a Cliff-notes version would be helpful.

Sounds like an economy version of the failing Intel Itanium
processor (low-level parallelism). Won't replace x86 PCs for
the same reason (requires a software port). Even Intel had
to adopt AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86/IA-32.

> So is does this mean a bad year for Intel, AMD, and MU?

Intel is already facing a bad year (two years, actually),
because they are so far behind AMD. This introduction may
further nick Intel if it displaces IA-32 chips in game
consoles. I see no effect on AMD.

And AMD64 chips, which ARE "consumer chips", can address
40TB of physical RAM, which is about 80x what PCs ship
with today.