I need one that will take me into my “golden years”.
Hmmm ... I wonder if it counts as the "golden years", if one has the years, but not yet the gold?
But enough of my situation.
For personal use, even high end boxes, Xeon is better suited than Itanium. The best available single processor speeds of Itanium won't be much better than Xeon (actually, the other way around, for some loads.)
The Itanium will provide support for terabytes of main memory, dozens or hundreds of parallel processors, world class floating point, and the sorts of power and exception handling required for extreme uptime.
Getting an Itanium for personal use could be like getting a Peterbilt for your personal car:
OK. What does a 379 Pete with, what, 8” straight cut’s, a polished cow crusher, and a Wilson Cellular antenna, have to do with a CPU, and why are they on this post? LOL
RE; Xeon vs. Tukwila Itanium. Tukwila and its associated chipset bring socket compatibility between Xeon and Itanium processors, by introducing the new interconnect called Intel QuickPath Interconnect. QuickPath, was called Common System Interface (CSI). This will reduce costs for both Intel and MoBo manufacturers.
Tukwila has four “full” QuickPath links and two “half” links. Xeon doesn’t.
And, Whitefield, the Xeon that had QuickPath, suffered so many project delays and development problems, its been canceled.
Husband, Father, Brother?