Heh. Look at all the Opteron sales to big tin companies like Cray; they sold more of them than Intel sold of the Itanium in the previous 2 years. HP is selling Opteron blade servers, and apparently cleaning up at it. Those who are waiting for Intel to swoop in with a 64 bit X86-64 solution are likely going to be waiting for another year. The Poser/AMD-Athlon problems weren't with the chip, but the chipset. That was the point where SIS and VIA had to stop cloning Intel functionality and design silicon for the divergent path AMD took, and it took them a few design cycles to get it right. Then there was the infamous capacitor farm issue, which had -nothing- to do with the silicon, and programs like Poser, which pushes the CPU to really suck on the power rails, were the unlucky sods that highlighted the power issues. I would be surprised if there weren't some quiet investigation going on behind the scenes. The added processor power and memory bandwidth would be a godsend to -any- rendering application.