[noNothing]

Itanium didn't kill off Alpha. Intel x86 pricing did. But the most important unheeded lesson in those days was software compatibilty. We went from the days of each computer having its own word length, instruction set, heck, even data format (remember the endian wars?) to source compatibility to binary compatibilty. We learned that for most useage, software stability that allowed taking advantage of Moores law, was seriously more valuable in most cases than gaining a bit more performance or price/performance by changing architectures.

Intel kept the X86 price at a point where no bean counter would favor investing in new architectures. Fortunately AMD broke the headlock on x86.

[sliken]

Well Intel's original plan was to keep x86 32 bit, forcing anyone that needed more into IA64. Fortunately AMD came out with x86-64, and when it was clear that IA64 wasn't going to be competitive, Intel brought x86-64 to their chips.