Itanium was pointless when Alpha existed already and was already getting market penetration in the high end market. Intel played disgusting corporate politics to kill it and then push the ugly failed Itanium to market, only to have to panic back to x86_64 later.

I have no idea how/why Intel got a second life after that, but they did. Which is a shame. A sane market would have punished them and we all would have moved on.

> I have no idea how/why Intel got a second life after that, but they did.

For the same reason the line "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." exists. Buying AMD at large companies was seen as a gamble that deciders weren't will to make. Even now, if you just call up your account managers at Dell, HP, or Lenovo asking for servers or PCs, they are going to quote you Intel builds unless you specifically ask. I don't think I've ever been asked by my sales reps if I wanted an Intel or AMD CPU. Just how many slots/cores, etc.

Alpha had a lot of implementation problems, e.g. floating point exceptions with untraceable execution paths.

Cray tried to build the T3E (iirc) out of Alphas. DEC bragged how good Alpha was for parallel computing, big memory etc etc.

But Cray publicly denounced Alpha as unusable for parallel processing (the T3E was a bunch of Alphas in some kind of NUMA shared memory.) It was so difficult to make the chips work together.

This was in the Cray Connect or some such glossy publication. Wish I'd kept a copy.

Plus of course the usual DEC marketing incompetence. They feared Alpha undoing their large expensive machine momentum. Small workstation boxes significantly faster than big iron.

Historically, when Intel is on their game, they have great products, and better than most support for OEMs and integrators. They're also very effective at marketting and arm twisting.

The arm twisting gets them through rough times like itanium and pentium4 + rambus, etc. I still think they can recover from the 10nm fab problems, even though they're taking their sweet time.

“Sane market” sounds like an oxymoron, technology markets have multiple failed attempts at doing the sane thing.

Gordon Moore tried to link up with Intel when he was at DEC. Alpha would have become Intels 64 bit architecture. This of course didn't happen and Intel instead linked up with DEC biggest competitor HP, and adopted their, much, much worse VLIW architecture.

Imagine a future where Intel and Apple both adopt DEC and Alpha instead of Intel HP and Apple IBM.