What's intriguing to me is that Itanic was the "fetch" that Intel tried to make happen not once, not twice, but three times: once as iAPX 432, once as i860, and

What's intriguing to me is that Itanic was the "fetch" that Intel tried to make happen not once, not twice, but three times: once as iAPX 432, once as i860, and once as Itanium. The whole idea of "pack multiple (often variable bit-length) instructions into a word and rely on compiler writers to determine optimal instruction packings" to make implementation simpler and therefore hopefully faster, but woe betide thee if thy compiler dost not find such optimal instruction packings; for then thy CPU will actually run code more slowly than a conventional design like x86! Someone very high up at Intel must've been very in love with this idea, as it was tried and flopped thrice throughout Intel's entire history as a major microprocessor vendor. I didn't think AMD64 was a good idea at the time because it was more of the same. But good on Dave for helping eliminate the cruft that pretty much killed the RISC revolution.