but AMD wouldn't have mattered if Itanic had been faster, cheap, and on time I dunno about that. My own personal opinion is that Intel has never been able to

but AMD wouldn't have mattered if Itanic had been faster, cheap, and on time I dunno about that. My own personal opinion is that Intel has never been able to re-architect their way out of the fact that the cornerstone of their success is that they are selling x86, and their customers mostly don't care about the theoretical advantages of the bright shiny new thing. They just want to run their software just like they always have. There's a reason why IA-64 has joined iAPX432, i860, StrongARM and i960 as Intel footnotes (outside of the embedded market). When they were philosophizing about what Itanic should look like, the only thing that x86 obviously needed from a market perspective was a bigger address space. And AMD was smart enough to deliver on that, and here we are.