Aragorn wrote:

> Intel only followed this architecture later with their /EM64T/ CPU's,
> because they finally realized that the Itanium was not going to hit
> mainstream at the pricetag they had stuck to it. ;-)

Well, I had the pleasure to put my hands on a quad Itanium2 machine (16G RAM
to make things even more pleasant) - all four horses running a dedicated
Redhat server. Well, *that* power was breathtaking. SQL query that lasted
>10 minutes on a strong, multiprocessor IA32 server took just a few SECONDS
on 4x I2. I guess that this huge amount of RAM helped a lot, but still
reduction of time by a factor of well over 50 is impressive. I didn't dare
to ask about the price...

--
Pawel Kraszewski
www.kraszewscy.net