Wow so much to say

The ONLY chip that right now is proven to work with XP-64 is the AMD64 series. 6 months after Intel's promise to match with similar abilities we have no proof at all that they work - and since Intel always feeds the press early when it has good news, that means the news pretty much stinks on the Intel front.

Frankly Intel has a lot of internal pressure to not bring this to market too fast, worse they have to copy someone else's architecture so it's likely to perform worse, and finally the top end AMD64 chips beat the pants off Intel's P4's. AMD64's are faster at office work (one side of the fence) and gaming fun (the other side of the fence) and have been heralded by MS for their superb quality!

And further when XP-64 comes out Intel will have had a few months to work out bugs and provide fixes, while the AMD portions will have had a year to show their ins and outs. That means that driver writers, code writers of all sorts have EXPERIENCE with the AMD64 platform, come the release time, which pays a huge dividend over time to the end user. Fixes will come faster for AMD64, fewer issues will crop up for AMD64 and with the AMD side of things you have nothing but a company motivated to bring you 64bit on the desktop. Intel is motivated to slow the boat down as much as they can, so you can expect the "little things" to come up to annoy the experience.

Now as far as MS's issues go, I think they've learned some things from XP SP 2, that they have found have to be fundamentally incorporated into the OS. And they probably realize that means a lot of new coding and testing for XP-64. Since we are all aware of the failings of XP and IE, we, as users, probably need to have SP2 and the changes it will bring. Thus, you should expect that XP-64 will need those same changes thus when they finish SP2 for XP, they'll have to get a lot of folks to work on bringing those same changes to XP-64. What does that mean? It means a few more months of waiting, rather than having an OS now, that you'll just have to add a SP to in a few months.

When Intel had a flag to wave (32 bit transition) they waved it high. I suspect now, they have a lame dog that is hard to get working and doesn't perform well. Intel, of course, could happily provide a working version of XP-64 on their cpu platform and prove me wrong. But they probably can't even get that right...

Eeeh, its already been known that Intel's EMT64 will be slower than AMD64 because some functions are emulated in the P4, while in AMD64 CPUs its full hardware.

Intel does not intend on taking AMD64 full time or even as long as AMD is insisting...It'll get involved, screw with it and then push the Itanium line in. Why do you think Intel hasn't dropped the Itanium? (And NASA is building a huge 10000+ CPU Itanium cluster for space research). In true 64bit, Itanium kicks AMD64's ass. (AMD knows this, and K9 is under development for it.)

AMD64 CPUs have the advantage of the ability to use both 32bit and 64bit...Its not a pure 64bit CPU...More like a "transitional CPU". It lets customers gradually fit into the 64bit market...Until K9 comes.

Agreed, but it will be a decade before you see Itanium successors running Doom5 on your desktop. So we both know that EM64T won't really fly, not now, and likely not ever.