There were two competing schools of thought in the late '70s and early '80s. One said that computer hardware should have hardware support for high level langua

There were two competing schools of thought in the late '70s and early '80s. One said that computer hardware should have hardware support for high level languages. That school led to the VAX, iAPX432, and 80X86. The other school said that computer hardware should be simple so that it could go faster, and that the compiler should be smart enough to map high level languages to simple hardware. Intel was firmly in the first camp. It flirted with the second repeatedly: see the late '80s i860/i960. Itanium was the biggest bet placed: it was a RISC-like architecture with the added complexity of multiple dispatch encoded in it's Very Long Instruction Word architecture. The compiler could rearrange instruction order to keep hardware busy, AND (to some extent) instruction contents. Itanium seemed like a reasonable bet, and Intel (and HP) had the clout to convince others. It was a factor in the decline of the Alpha and MIPS server market, and even Sun hedged its bets by porting Solaris.