Yeah, and Intel just announced 64-bit extensions to Xeon. The question is, is the company truly behind it, or is there a sizeable faction that thinks this new-fangled stuff is just a distraction from the main business?
I was at a digital imaging conference about ten years ago. My company had several meetings with the Kodak guys, who were also there. I visited their shop, which was basically an R&D lab. They described a huge amount of internal strife within the company over whether Kodak should get into digital imaging. They of course were for it, because they were from the digital imaging division. And they had the blessing of the CEO to proceed. But they were many people, in powerful positions, at Kodak who insisted that "digital imaging" was a fad, and that Kodak should not be wasting time on it.
My point is that, in that situation, a CEO has to keep those guys happy too, because they are the ones who are paying the bills right now. So even though he might be totally behind the effort to "go digital," he will throw those guys bones, like pouring more money into research on silver halide film, and funding development of still more film-based consumer-grade cameras, even though he knows it's probably a waste of money.
Remember the Apple /// and the Apple ][ GS? Here was Jobs personally heading up the Macintosh effort, his name was practically on the building, and he still let the Apple ][ guys have another couple rounds of fun before squashing that thing.
Big companies always have this problem of competing interests inside. That's why they frequently lose huge amounts of market share (and sometimes all of it) to total upstarts. Why did Barnes and Noble wait as long as they did before reacting to Amazon.com? Because the company was totally dependent at the time on selling books through retail stores, and the store managers saw every book sold through the web as a dollar out of their hides. It's almost certain that there were some in there who warned that "we can't let this guy Bezos achieve escape velocity; if he does, we'll never be able to knock him off." But they did exactly that, and Amazon now has Barnes-and-Noble-class economies of scale. B&N can compete with them, but they can't wipe the floor with them, the way they could have if they had moved quickly.
This is exactly what Intel is going through. AMD is a punk, but if Intel allows it to achieve escape velocity with Opteron and Athlon-64, Intel could lose the server business, and ultimately the desktops as well when cheap machines migrate to 64-bit chips as the prices drop. Intel needs to head this off at the pass. Adding 64-bit addressing to a 32-bit chip tells the market that Intel still doesn't "get it." What they really want to do is fool around with Itanium some more. Well, people have machines to build, and market share to gain, and they can't afford to wait around until Intel gets smart. I'll bet this announcement results in a huge round of design wins for AMD. People have now seen the Intel response. If that was it, it's AMD for sure.