It appeared to me (from far outside) that Intel was trying to segment the market into "Affordable Home and office PC:s with x86" and "Expensive serious computing with itanium". Having everything so different was a feature, to justify the eyewateringly expensive itanium pricetag.

▲

windward 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Seems shortsighted (I'm not saying you're wrong, I can imagine Intel being shortsighted). Surely the advantage of artificial segmentation is that it's artificial: you don't double up the R&D costs.

	▲	trashface 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe they thought they would just freeze x86 architecturally going forward and Itanium would be nearly all future R&D. Not a bet I would have taken but Intel probably felt pretty unstoppable back then.

▲

kuschku 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The same trick they pulled again with AVX512 and ECC support later on.

	▲	clausecker 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		And the same reason NVRAM was dead on arrival. No affordable dev systems meant that only enterprise software supported it.

▲

Earw0rm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The IBM PS/2 play. And we all know how well that one worked out.

	▲	happosai 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm sure it worked out for many bosses. They got their bonuses and promotions and someone else got to clean up mess.