I'm not addressing whether things would have worked in reality, I'm telling you what the corporate leadership was telling us at the time. You can claim all you

I'm not addressing whether things would have worked in reality, I'm telling you what the corporate leadership was telling us at the time. You can claim all you want that it wasn't realistic or whatever, but this is the same corporate leadership that thought everyone would be perfectly happy to spend $$$$ on patented RAMBUS memory. Yes, they really did seem to think that IA64 was going to be everywhere eventually. x86 code was slow on Itanic because it was just a bolt-on PentiumPro IIRC. It was only there for compatibility mode, and was never meant to be high performance. Code needing performance was going to be compiled for IA64 using the magic compiler that didn't exist yet.