This article highlights unexpected events in the U.S. computer industry as of May 2004. The largest changes have happened to Intel. It was set to bring its new 90 nanometer Prescott chips into the market and had updated Itanium chips in the queue. AMD's Opteron chips were then becoming a major challenge for Intel, as they were both powerful and offered 64-bit extensions while still running 32-bit code very well. The 90 nm Prescott chips hit the performance Web sites with unimpressive marks, some slower than the existing 130 nm Northwood Pentium processors. On the Itanium side, IBM is taking its Power processor architecture to levels that are very competitive with Intel's Itanium. Intel's plan to dominate the high end processor market with its proprietary Itanium design now faces challenges from AMD and IBM. Sun Microsystems is another company in the throes of change. It has cancelled its next planned processor, the UltraSparc V, in order to go with new multicore designs named Niagara and Rock. On top of these processor events, the personal computer industry is about to go through a major set of changes in 2004 and 2005. The biggest computer industry change is driven by AMD's 64-bit extensions to the original Intel x86 architecture. Given the existing huge investment in x86 software, this guarantees the x86 ISA dominance for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, IBM continues to push high-end system development, basing its systems on three classes of processors. This will gradually reduce the overhead of maintaining multiple versions of support software, operating systems, and middleware for its wide array of systems. We have reached a new level of competence and competition. Mergers, acquisitions and partnerships have created a few powerhouses from what was a widely distributed industry only five years earlier. Hardware technology will continue to advance, delivering more performance with less power and space.