Processor that trades potential performance for backward compatibility with dinosaur programs. Apparently Intel feels there is something wrong with having a few people simply recompile code. If they streamlined everything, it would be killer speed. Instead it wastes CPU cycles on CISC code and managing the stone-age ISA bus. (although I must confess, my modem is ISA, due to all the PCI shit being winmodems and all)

I wonder how much of an improvement IA-64 really is. Probably much more bloated than the current x86's.

Zorin: Nice. It should be noted that the Pentium Pro up to Pentium III are all the same processor family: i686.