Say goodnight to front-side busses in Intel microprocessors. Rival AMD doesn't use them, and Intel will begin phasing them out in 2007, officials said. Instead there will be a high-speed interconnect technology--the equivalent of replacing mass transit systems with super-wide highways where everyone drives a Dodge Viper. Therefore, data gets to its destination more directly. (It also means the future Reidland and Whitefield versions of the Xeon family are canceled.) Meanwhile, the current generation of Itanium chips will be upgraded in mid-2006, a delay from the original early-2006 time frame.

For more on the technology changes:
- read this InformationWeek article