Any story trying to argue Itanium was a success is (IMHO) historical revisionism. When this was conceived, Intel’s view was somewhat consistent with Microsoft

Any story trying to argue Itanium was a success is (IMHO) historical revisionism. When this was conceived, Intel’s view was somewhat consistent with Microsoft were others. Remember that at one point Windows NT ran on other architectures (eg DEC Alpha, MIPS). At this point Intel wanted to solve the compatibility issue by booting on an x86 chip essentially. The article mentions this part. In the 90s AMD (and Cyrix) had competitive 486 parts due to due to some old licensing agreements. Intel wanted to end this with a new architecture. But then Itanium was delayed and really expensive. At the same time AMD invented the x86-64 extensions and released Athlon, which was much cheaper and has a much easier path to 64 bit. Due to those same licensing agreements Intel was entitled to those extensions, copied x86-64 and the HP-Intel Itanium died. In the early 2000s Intel was in a tough spot. They’d defeated the 486 competitors with Pentium. This was the last clock speed race. But Intel hit the 3GHz barrier. The only thing that saved Intel was their mobile chips (ie Core Duo). They didn’t have clock speed but they had efficiency and performance. At the time you could find articles where enthusiasts found ways to build desktops out of Core Duo chips. They were that good. But Intel tried to milk Pentium just a little too long. Athlon forced their hand, particularly when Opteron started gaining server market share. Opteron destroyed the last hope Intel had of forcing the proprietary EPIC architecture down people’s throats. The Core Duo was so successful it is still on the DNA of today’s Intel’s CPUs. It’s where the branding “Core” originated. It saved Intel.