AMD Killed the Itanium (2005)
Itanium can be regarded as a huge success. Maybe some don&#x27;t remember, but the minicomputers and unices were where all the money was. Sure, Intel had the process edge, and had completely cornered the microcomputer market. But PCs had slim margins and didn&#x27;t really matter in the bigger scope important data processing.<p>Many of the computer nerds watched in awe as vendor after vendor dropped their hugely expensive and engineering heavy custom CPU architectures and lined up behind Intel. IBM was the only big player who didn&#x27;t swallow the bait. &quot;Even if they fail, that&#x27;s a huge success&quot; was a common observation at the time.<p>And sure enough. I don&#x27;t think they failed on purpose, but business wise it was a win-win situation. The x86 architecture would have won anyway, because of the sheer scale, but the Itanium wreckage hastened it. Everyone needed to move, so why not move to x86&#x2F;Linux directly?