Looks like HP answered my secret prayers and published some SPEC results for the upcoming Itanium 2 (which won't be available in the configuration they tested until september, according to their SPEC submission).

I won't write some of my crappy prose today, I'll just try to look at a few results. These are the best CINT2000-base and CFP2000-base results for various CPUs.

Athlon XP 1800MHz ("2200+") : 738 / 624

Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878

Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202

Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356

While those CPUs perform similarly on the integer tests (plus or minus 10%), the story is very different in floating-point, where the "PC" CPUs still have lots of work to do in order to catch up.

I think that this marks Intel's entry into the workstation market. All that I hope is that they actually encounter some form of competition, which will force everyone to innovate and lower their prices, which would likely have an impact on the desktop market as well.