[pyre]

The problem with IA64 being that Intel designed/patented it so that they could bring in royalties if/when everyone went to 64-bit and used their architecture. I'm thanking amd64 for saving us from creating a new generation of processors where everyone was paying an Intel tax. It may have a superior design, but I don't want every processor in a desktop/laptop out there to be a revenue generation machine for a single company, even when the processor's manufacturer is different.

[rbanffy]

I was using 64-bit processors and OSs a couple years before Intel shipped IA64. Try to google SPARC and MIPS.

What AMD did was to extend the x86 ISA with a handful extra registers and double the size of all of them. This allowed x86 to survive until these days, slowed down the migration towards 64-bit computing and confined much better architectures to specific niches.

No, I will not thank AMD for that.