Anyway according to the current crop of Intel engineers the new memory architecture will be "very fast". (Until a better one comes along which I guess will be "very very fast"). I wonder do they consider DDR DRAM "slow"? In that case DRAM must be very slow and plain old RAM very very ultra slow. Maybe I should just wait until we have very very very fast memory, but if I wait until very very very very fast memory comes along I might be retired.

Also funny is the way Barrett and Mike Fister are putting the quantum spin on Itanium. They claimed there are 100,000 Itanium systems which is ridiculous. According to analysts there are only a few thousand systems out there most of which are experimental. Reminds me of Nokia's claim of having sold 400,000 N-Gages. Right.

After giving us the lowdown on their Itanium sales they announced 64-bit x86 extensions which basically drive a stake through the heart of the Itanic (finally) and then they went on to say that Itanium will be positioned as an architecture for "big databases". I think they meant to say "very big databases" or perhaps "very very big databases". The question is just how big does the database have to be to qualify for the Itanium? My guess is that it has to be very very very ultra ultra ultra big.