[ghaff]

I'm inclined to agree. Intel would have been loathe to go the 64-bit x86 route on their own. But a somewhat resurgent AMD pretty much forced their hand given the sorry state of Itanium development. Absent AMD, I'm pretty sure they'd have found a path to a "good enough" Itanium to sell successfully.

For what it's worth, I followed Itanium as an IT industry analyst and wrote a short book recently on the topic. https://s3.amazonaws.com/bitmasons.com/docs/Lessons+from+the...

[MBCook]

Right. Even if Itanium worked better and was released to consumers AMD might have done the same thing and still won.