[rythie]

The industry was already moving away from the big 64 bit SMP machines made Sun, SGI & IBM. In many cases a cluster of 32bit x86 machines made more sense than one expensive big machine with high priced support contracts and parts. 32 bit x86 machines already supported more than 4GB total memory with PAE, it was just that one process couldn’t use more than 4GB. Other 64bit chips were already well established (SPARC, POWER, MIPS), probably for most of the users they couldn’t easily move to a new CPU architecture. For other users by the time they needed the bigger machines x86 64bit was already available, including from Intel themselves. AMD was limited 8 sockets from what I remember, so their was still a small market for big Itanium systems (like SGI’s Altix).