alt Hacker NewsPaper-Itanium is unfairly blamed / credited with that, but it's not exactly true. The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories. x86 systems were undercutting their high margin workstation and server business, subsidized by enormous volumes in PC market needed to sustain increasing silicon manufacturing and design costs of new generations. The RISCs were forced to keep retreating to higher margin, lower volume, more specialized, higher performance markets which was really their only option by that point but it was also exactly the wrong direction to go in for long-term viability in the face of these prevailing trends.
Intel had their foundries and CPU cores paid for by video gamers and receptionists and students typing up their assignments and people looking at porn at 14.4kbps. Servers and workstations were pretty much gravy and every year there was less their systems couldn't do compared to the big iron.
Those computers pretty much sold themselves, contrast with every $20k workstation or $100k server that the unix guys had to explain why they were worth 5x the grey box on the desk.
SGI was struggling to make their MIPS chips and were pretty quickly finished off when nvidia started making GPUs. Itanium originated at HP as a PA-RISC replacement. They owned DEC Alpha when they killed it but arguably DEC didn't have a big base of legacy software at that point. IBM and Sun stood for a lot longer, mainly I would say largely due to locked in customers/data on Oracle and DB2 databases and proprietary software, rather than the merits of their hardware.
If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC. Might have happened even sooner from Intel since they allegedly sandbagged efforts in that direction to protect Itanium.
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> The vertically integrated RISC/UNIX minicomputer companies were not on economically viable trajectories.
Well, actually one survived, and is making a fruity company quite happy, which also survived the 16 and 8 bit vertically integrated home computer companies.
The successful merge of NeXT and Apple, meant PC OEMs now dream of margins of those days hence why building desktops has become a niche market, everything is vertically integrated across laptops, tablets and phones and smart devices.
That alternative timeline means Intel would actually bother creating 64-bit x86 server chips instead of Itanium, because on their roadmap they were never expecting AMD to come out with an alternative.
> If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC.
If AMD had launched amd64 server chips those vendors onboard we might have had a different 64-bit x86 market. And those vendors would have had a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits instead of due to dead end chip.
Alpha cancellation happened before HP/Compaq merger, when it was purely Compaq decision.
At the time some partnerships were slowly reducing the base costs of making Alpha machines (with K7 Athlon motherboards and EV6 Alpha being essentially signal compatible but not pinout compatible - you could reuse the chips and most of the design).
Compaq however... was not interested, for various reasons.