I’m not sure the timeline really works for this argument. Pentium was the first x86 superscalar and that was 1993 so it predates Itanium. Rather Intel wanted t

I’m not sure the timeline really works for this argument. Pentium was the first x86 superscalar and that was 1993 so it predates Itanium. Rather Intel wanted to leave the baggage of x86 behind, segment the market for higher profits and hoped to get better performance than superscalar x86. But they never achieved the latter and most people just wanted 64 bit and software compatibility.