[ghaff]

Intel was independently developing 64-bit extensions under the code name Yamhill. I know there some legal settlements around the time so they may have cross-licensed technology. AMD came out first but Intel had much the same thing in its back pocket.

What I last statement meant was we ended up by an industry dominated by 64-bit x86 anyway in spite of all the effort that went into an alternative 64-bit architecture. So we’d probably be in a similar place had Intel just decided Itanium was a bad idea from the start.

[chx]

What ...? Yamhill was an answer to AMD64. The first rumors appeared in 2002 where AMD announced AMD64 in 1999, released the full specs in 2000 and actually shipped the first Opteron CPU in 2003 April, Intel shipped the Nocona in June 2004. This trailing remained for a while -- LAHF/SAHF in 64 bit was shipped in March 2005 by AMD but only December 2005 by Intel.

[ghaff]

Well sure. Intel much preferred Itanium to succeed. Absent AMD, it’s possuble Itanium would have muddled through in the end. (Or something completely different would have played out.)

it’s safe to say that Intel has some sort of contingency plan going back quite a while. Some analysts even thought they saw features in Pentium that suggested 64-bit readiness.

But it wasn’t until Opteron’s success and its adoption by esp. HP and Dell that Intel felt they needed to make their 64 bit extensions plan public.

[FullyFunctional]

You are correct. What people don't seem to appreciate are the internal conflicts within large organizations. There were in fact massive internal conflicts at Intel between the Itanic and the legacy. Companies that large doesn't "think with a single brain".

Random aside: Itanic was HP's brainchild that was adopted and refined at Intel (and far from all of Intel was excited about that). Having experienced a VLIW that _didn't_ suck (the internal engine of Transmeta's Astro 2/Efficieon) I'm sad that EPIC/Itanic gives VLIW as bad name. However, the future belongs to RISC-V.