I'm curious how far in advance Intel had planned out the IA-64 vision. Itanium makes more sense if viewed through the lens of "we want to get into the high-mar

I'm curious how far in advance Intel had planned out the IA-64 vision. Itanium makes more sense if viewed through the lens of "we want to get into the high-margin spaces currently occupied by boutique architectures like Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, etc." This is a place where they could say "recompile all your software for 30% more performance" and get away with it. If they sincerely imagined "one day, we also cut over from x86 to IA-64 on the desktop", they must have expected that to happen several generations further along than the platform ever got. They had an emulation mode in early Itania, but it was slow enough that there's no way they could say to people with a straight face that it was a viable choice. This also seems like it would raise tensions with Microsoft, who is equally beholden to the promise of "your old closed-source stuff will still work in 20 years." They have to figure out how to work around the factors Intel has given them.