I'm here this morning at an Intel's "Multicore Architecture" press briefing in San Francisco with Pat Gelsinger (yep it's St Patrick's Day!!!), Sr VP of Intel's Digital Enterprise group and Stephen Smith, VP of the group's operations.
Inspite having one slide on Tukwila, the next-generation Itanium, the Intel execs main point this morning was to show how "extensible" and "scalable" is the X86 architecture dubbed IA for Intel Architecture: from milli-watts with the Atom chip to Peta FLOPs i.e. Xeon, not Itanium!

Although a few years back, Intel did differentiate IA-32 (X86) and IA-64 (Itanium and not X86 compatible). Now, it's just IA and just X86... that tells it all for Itanium's future!

"[Pat's theme at IDF in China next month] is showing how we can apply IA to computing needs connected to the Internet from the milliwatt application to the HPC petaflop application. And the cool thing about this is that for our IA all the way to Xeon, it's a single code base", Stephen Smith said.