Intel: New chip instruction sets not in the cards

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Intel appears to have learned its lesson from the Itanium saga.

The company isn't working on developing any new instruction sets for its future chips, Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said at an Intel Research open house here on Wednesday. "We're trying to minimize the natural urges to build something new," he said.

Itanium was at one point Intel's vision of the road to 64-bit computing. The chip is powerful, but it uses a completely different instruction set than the x86 instruction set used by the Core and Pentium chips. Software developers need to rewrite their software to take advantage of the chip's performance, which is never an easy task.

Advanced Micro Devices developed a more popular way to get to 64 bits by adding extensions to the x86 instruction set, an approach Intel disdained earlier in the decade but later followed suit. Not all that many server users, and very few PC users, are running 64-bit software, but Itanium has been relegated to a high-performance computing niche, while 64-bit x86 chips are the standard.

Intel remains open to adding instructions to the x86 instruction set, but it's assuming that new instruction sets are not in the cards, Rattner said. Intel's software partners are very much on board with that strategy, he said.