Intel not planning new instruction sets for 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.