Except that Intel wasn't in any danger of dying, I agree. Even with Itanium's steep costs and delays, NetBurst came pretty close to keeping pace with the Athlon

Except that Intel wasn't in any danger of dying, I agree. Even with Itanium's steep costs and delays, NetBurst came pretty close to keeping pace with the Athlon and Athlon 64 -- close enough for Intel to compete with price. Admittedly, it was largely due to the fact that Intel had the edge in both fabrication technology and capacity, but either way AMD couldn't make enough processors to satisfy global demand. By way of example, recall that in the first month after Intel started shipping its first 64-bit x86 processor (a NetBurst Xeon whose code name I have forgotten), that processor outsold the combined annual production of G5, Athlon64, AND Opteron. AMD had a lead in many ways, but wasn't even in the ballpark as far as fabrication capacity. "The efforts that fail almost always assume that the new system will be 100% capable on day 1 and the switchover will be effortless and complete instantaneously (rather than costly, time consuming, and incremental)." Agreed -- and it's all the more reason that Intel should have relied exclusively on the binary translation technology that they inherited along with the Alpha development team, technology, and intellectual property.