87ninefiveone :
This is just blatantly wrong and rates right up there with people who think that just because two products are made in the same factory that they'll be equivalent to each other.
The reason for Itaniums and Xeons being the same is obvious. Business who use those products buy 100's or 1000's at a time and need to them to be forward and backwared compatible to avoid huge capitol outlays. The consumer market however is driven by individuals and allows for more flexibility since 99% of people could care less about backwards and forwards compatible socket design. They need a new PC they buy one.
As the Intel rep explained, adding new technologies require the use of different sockets. If they need 1155 pins to do the job, there’s probably just not much of a chance that 33% of those pins are just sitting there doing nothing aside from making you buy a new socket type over your old LGA 775 setup. Granted 1155/1156, and 1366/2011 are pretty annoying there’s an obvious reason for it with the 2/4 core support vs. 4+ core support.
The reason for current Itaniums and Xeons being the same is obvious? They aren't the same they just both support the same chipset. Itanium and Xeon use extremely different architectures that aren't even as similar as 32 bit x86 and 64 bit x86. Itaniums use the EPIC architecture that is closer to VLIW than x86 and it is still pretty far from VLIW.
Not only are you wrong about the first parts of my post but you completely ignore the last part which pretty much says that I agreed with the Intel rep and the post right above your own post where I say I agree with the Intel rep. Yes there is good reason for using new sockets but it isn't because we need to use a new socket, but because we want to.
If Intel really wanted to they could have made Nehalem CPUs use the LGA 775 socket but that would have meant that the on-die memory controller and the IGP (for those CPUS that had one) would have been inaccessible and that they would have needed to put the circuitry to make Nehalem compatible with the socket on the CPU, essentially making it an architectural upgrade to the Core 2 series instead of a radical change in the CPU/chipset features and what chips those features are on. That would have made it like the difference between current Itanium and Xeon products or between AMD's AM3 and AM3+ CPUs. They have different architectures but can both use the same sockets.
My whole point was that we don't need to move to new chipsets/sockets but that we do so because it allows us to advance the technology.