With how long it took Intel to ship expensive, incompatible, so-so performance ia64 chips - your theory needs an alternate universe where Intel has no competitors, ever, to take advantage of the obvious market opportunity.

bombcar 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It was also an era where people were happily stating on PAE 32 bit x86 rather than pay the price and performance premium for Itanium.

4gb of RAM existed but many many systems weren’t even close to it yet.

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pjmlp 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't need suggestions for a time I live through, I am in computers since the 1980's.

Without AMD, there was no alternative in the PC world, It was already the first 64 bit version of Windows XP.

Since we're providing suggestions in computing history, I assume you can follow the dates,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#Windows_XP...

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bell-cot 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Without AMD, ...

Perhaps? I don't know enough to judge whether one of the other companies working on IA-32 compatible processors could plausibly have stepped in -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_IA-32_compatibl...

It's true that most of those would have lacked the resources to replicate AMD's feat with AMD64. OTOH, AMD itself had to buy out NexGen to produce their K6. Without AMD and/or AMD64, there'd be plenty of larger players who might decide to fill the void.

	▲	layla5alive 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		What other competitors? Cyrix was long dead by the time this happened.