[ghaff]

It's more complicated than that.

Sun didn't slow down on UltraSPARC or make an Itanium side bet. IBM did (and continues to) place their big hardware bet on Power--Itanium was mostly a cover your bases thing. I don't know what HP would have done--presumably either gone their own way with VLIW or kept PA-RISC going.

Pretty much all the other RISC/Unix players had to go to a standard processor; some were already on x86. Intel mostly recovered from Itanium specifically but it didn't do them any favors.

[sliken]

Actually, they did. Intel promised aggressive delivery schedule, performance ramp, and performance. The industry took it hook, line, and sinker. While AMD decided not to limit 64 bit to the high end and brought out x86-64.

Sun did a port IA64 port of solaris, which is definitely an itanium side bet.

HP was involved in the IA64 effort and definitely was planning on the replacement of pa-risc from day 1.

[davidgay]

> HP was involved in the IA64 effort and definitely was planning on the replacement of pa-risc from day 1.

As my memory remembers and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium agrees, Itanium originated at HP. So yes, a replacement for pa-risc from day 1, but even more so...

[rodgerd]

Another way to look at the Itanic is that HP somehow conned Intel into betting the farm on building HP-PA3 for HP. Which is pretty impressive.

[panick21_]

Sun didn't slow down on UltraSPARC but they were just not very good at designing processors.