Intel is worried about AMD's upcoming Hammer processor and the x86-64 architecture, which it brings to the market. Due out by the end of 2002, the Hammer represents an alternative to Intel's IA-64 architecture, which has proven exceptionally difficult to migrate into datacenters and has yet to gain significant popularity. An anonymous engineer reported to The San Jose Mercury News that Intel is secretly working to develop 64-bit extensions to the upcoming Prescott Pentium 4 chip, codenamed Yamhill.

Public sources are obviously very quiet on this topic since a public announcement of this work represents a tacit admission that the Itanium's $1 billion architecture is on the verge of finding itself stuck in a tiny niche of the market.