BAIT FISHING for conspiracy theorists is probably a game that VPs play. Every now and then they let something slip out that leaves the INQ ready and waiting to bite. The latest worm on the hook comes courtesy of InternetNews.com and it's a really juicy one. One Sun VP reckons Intel has another 64bit architecture waiting in the wings.

Shahin Khan, Sun Vice President of High Performance and Technical Computing (HPTC), said of 64bit processor architectures, "there is Itanium, Opteron, and what Intel calls Ant Hill, so there are three different sets of instructions." Ant Hill? That's a new one.

Yamhill is the name that has done the rounds. Or *T as it became known as, apparently. So is the Sun exec talking about Yamhill and just messing it up or maybe calling it by an internal Sun nickname?

That leaves even bigger questions. Like the fact that Khan says that Ant Hill is not the same architecture as the Opteron. So forget x86-64 AMD64, this is something different. That should set the cat amongst the pigeons. If it's not an AMD64 processor, does that mean Intel has its own 64bit x86 architecture?

And if Intel has its own 64bit x86 architecture, could that explain why Microsoft has been holding back on its 64bit x86 version of Windows? After all, the Vole has been demonstrating it for a very long time now, at least in private.

Could we be about to see a fracturing of x86 into two competing but incompatible 64bit architectures? Or was it just a slip of the tongue by the Sun VP?

The only thing not in doubt is that the whole thing smells fishy.

Source: The Inquirer