You are think of Intel as having a single mind. The reality, and the reality of most large organizations, is that the ant hill is beaming with divergent and co

You are think of Intel as having a single mind. The reality, and the reality of most large organizations, is that the ant hill is beaming with divergent and competing opinions. In particular, there were two powerful, competing camps: x86 and Itanium. The combined effect of Itanium performance not living up to promises [1] and AMD introducing a 64-bit x86 extension shifted the power balance, but it wasn't an inevitable outcome. [1] The first iteration (I have one in the garage) was ~ 486 level fast and, sure, the final iterations were fast, but that took an AWFUL lot of silicon. The perf/transistor is terrible, even worse than x86 (which is bad).