[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.