Intel's 64-bit Technology: Come Late, Stay Quiet

As you may know, Intel recently brought legacy compatible 64-bit technology to its Xeon and Pentium 4 lines of processors. This move was inevitable when you take into account the huge success that AMD has had with its Opteron line of 32-bit/64-bit chips as compared to Intel's Itanium ('I-tanic') Server processors. Intel needed to close this gap, and they have. The question is, why is Intel being so quiet about it? Compared to AMD's triumphant buildup and release of its 64-bit server and Athlon64 desktop processors, Intel's recent incorporation of 64-bit x86-compatible instructions into its chips could be classified as pretty much invisible. If a thousand-pound elephant could tiptoe, that would be what Intel did in bringing 64-bit to their products.