alt Hacker NewsThat is not what happened.
EPIC development at HP started in 01989, and the Intel collaboration was publicly announced in 01994. The planned ship date for Merced, the first Itanic, was 01998, and it was first floorplanned in 01996, the year Java was announced. Merced finally taped out in July 01999, three months after the first JIT option for the JVM shipped. Nobody was assuming that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century at that time, although there were some promising signs from Self and Strongtalk that maybe they could be half as fast as C.
By the time IA-64 actually got close to shipping Intel was certainly talking about JIT being a factor in its success. At least that was mentioned in the marketing guff they were putting out.