As someone who followed IA64/Itanium pretty closely, it's still not clear to me the degree to which Intel (or at least groups within Intel) thought IA64 was a genuinely better approach and the degree to which Intel (or at least groups within Intel) simply wanted to get out from existing cross-licensing deals with AMD and others. There were certainly also existing constraints imposed by partnerships, notably with Microsoft.

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ajross 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Both are likely true. It's easy to wave it away in hindsight, but there was genuine energy and excitement about the architecture in its early days. And while the first chips were late and on behind-the-cutting-edge processes they were actually very performant (FPU numbers were world-beating, even -- parallel VLIW dispatch really helped here).

Lots of people loved Itanium and wanted to see it succeed. But surely the business folks had their own ideas too.

	▲	kimixa 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes - VLIW seems to lend itself to computation-heavy code, used to this day in many DSP (and arguably GPU, or at least "influences" many GPU) architectures.