I wouldn&#x27;t call Itanium &#x27;such a strategy&#x27;, because it wasn&#x27;t even similar to x86.  64 bit mode could have rearranged the instruction coding while keeping everything from ASM up roughly the same.  Few single byte opcodes and bigger ranges for prefixes to improve density.  Keeping all parts of register specifiers together to improve sanity.  Etc.