In order to fight some of the bad press that Intel is getting about the Itanium processor in comparison to the Opteron processor from AMD, Intel has announced that they will be producing a 32-bit "converter" to allow 32-bit code to run on the 64-bit architecture.

The article in Information Week give basic info about the program, that will supposedly provide 1.5Ghz XEON performance on a 1.5GHz Itanium. It is worth noting that the best price I could find for a 900MHz Itanium was nearly $2400...

Interesting to note is that the folks at AMD are claiming substantial speedups in 32-bit code running on 32-bit OSs using the Opteron, so Intel has a bit of catching up to do.