hp thought that it was not good for individual enterprise system companies like hp to make proprietary processors, so hp worked with intel in 1994 to create the ia-64 architecture, made with epic's ideas. intel wanted to make a large effort in creating ia-64 in the expectation that the resulting processor would be used by most enterprise systems. hp and intel had a large design effort to make the first itanium product, merced, in 1998.