According to The Inquirer, Intel was going to respond to the upcoming ClawHammer processor from AMD with some product based on x86-64 architecture. This project was known as Yamhill and was intended solely for competition with hammer family. However, the company seems to have changed its plans now, because The Inquirer claims they canceled their x86-64 Yamhill.

At the recently held meeting in New-York, the head of Intel Company announced that they will not have any 64bit processors capable of performing the existing 32bit code. Instead Intel will focus on improving the IA-64 processors, because they don’t feel like giving up what they have been developing for 10 years. At present Intel is testing Madison samples, which should later come to replace McKinley.

This announcement of Intel’s sounds more than strange, because AMD Hammer is destined to be a success from the very beginning due to its architecture. This means that Intel can lose a pretty tangible part of the desktop PC market if they have nothing to strike back, because their Pentium 4 will never be able to run 64bit code, no matter how fast it is.

We would like to mention separately the following. Some analysts claim that the introduction of registers similar to those used in AMD Hammer processors could increase the Prescott die size only by 5%. However, the launching of Prescott-Yamhill by Intel could help the competitor to promote x86-64 a lot, because the software developers couldn’t disregard such a nice couple.

As we see, Intel decided to help neither its competitors, nor itself, hoping that the software developers will not react in any way to the innovations made to the CPUs from a small Sunnyvale Company. All this reminds us of 3DNow! and Quake3 game, which showed the world what high-quality SIMD instructions could do. Two years later Intel introduced Pentium III processor with the Streaming SIMD Extensions set.