THE X86 ARCHITECTURE is soon to be pretty much the only game in town. It was bound to happen. In Intel's perfect world, everybody would be using its processor architecture. And that corporate dream is being realised right now, though not in the way Intel might have hoped. It's going to have to share the credit with arch-rival AMD.

It all comes down to 64bit computing. Intel tried to stave off the market's hunger for a cheap 64bit processor, at least until it was ready to produce cut-down versions of the Itanium, but the path was set by IBM and Intel many years ago. Intel failed to pay enough attention to its own history; the lessons were there in the move from 16 to 32bit.

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