If amd64 had not been released, I think itanium would probably own the server market. But it would be a very different server market .. much more like the late

If amd64 had not been released, I think itanium would probably own the server market. But it would be a very different server market .. much more like the late 90s market than today's market. Remember that Intel was twisting arms and making deals to kill the weaker RISC chips in the marketplace. In the leadup to the first Itanium, HP had acquired Compaq (which had acquired DEC), so they held both Alpha and PA-RISC. And SGI was still a fairly big player with mips64. Both HP and SGI made deals to use Itanium going forward (with HP going so far as to port HP-UX and VMS to Itanium). I think the server marketplace would probably have been much higher margin without amd64 competition, as itanium was always a high margin player. Its main competitors were the high margin server chips above, plus POWER and SPARC. The low end was x86 controlled by intel, and they could certainly continue to artificially segregate the market and keep margins high. That's what they were good any monopoly does, and what they've been trying to do today with Xeons. I was a huge fan of Alpha (one of 2 people who ported FreeBSD to the alpha), and I was very sad to see it go. I've always blamed Itanium for its downfall -- I think Alpha had a lot more headroom than PA-RISC, and HP would have kept it going if it were not for Itanium. So I have to admit that I'm quite happy to see Itanium die.