With the arrival two months from now of apple computer Inc.'s new desktop machines and their 64-bit CPUs, the race to the next generation of mass-market processing power suddenly has a third horse running hard. Intel Corp.'s Itanium, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron and Athlon 64, and now the IBM PowerPC 970 (or G5) processor in forthcoming Apple systems offer distinctly different options to users of memory-intensive applications. All three 64-bit architectures must compete against the frugal enterprise buyer's base case of continuing to buy commodity-priced workstations and servers using variants of Intel's 32-bit Pentium 4. Intel's gamble on a long instruction pipeline in the P4, although it slows performance of unpredictable operations, has enabled a rapid climb to clock speeds once considered unthinkable for an x86 machine.
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