alt Hacker NewsItanium only failed because AMD for various reasons was able to come up with AMD64 and rug pull Intel's efforts.
In an alternative universe without AMD64, Intel would have kept pushing Itanium while sorting out its issues, HP-UX was on it, and Windows XP as well.
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bell-cot • today at 10:41 AM
Suggested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#History
With how long it took Intel to ship expensive, incompatible, so-so performance ia64 chips - your theory needs an alternate universe where Intel has no competitors, ever, to take advantage of the obvious market opportunity.
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Other way round: the only way any company other than Intel was able to get a new instruction set launched into the PC space was because Intel face-planted so hard with Itanium, and AMD64 was the architecture developers actually wanted to use - just make the registers wider and have more of them, and make it slightly more orthogonal.