It also didn't help that the Itanium project was delayed many years. Actually the first one "Merced", was supposed to come out 95 or 96. Had it been on time, th

It also didn't help that the Itanium project was delayed many years. Actually the first one "Merced", was supposed to come out 95 or 96. Had it been on time, things might have looked quite differently. And indeed, I think it was the AMD64 which breathed new life into x86, killing both the Itanium as well as most classical RISC architectures, because it was a nice upgrade path from existing PCs.