Itanium: The Great X86 Replacement That Never Was

Itanium was Intel and HP's ambitious attempt in the 1990s to replace x86 with a new EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architecture called IA-64. Plagued by internal politics between Intel and HP, repeated delays, and underestimated engineering complexity, Itanium finally launched in 2003 — four years late. By then, RISC competitors had closed the performance gap. In an ironic twist, Itanium's failure actually strengthened x86: AMD recognized developers wouldn't recompile for a new architecture and instead created AMD64, a 64-bit extension to x86 designed by Jim Keller. AMD64 outsold Itanium, forcing Intel to eventually adopt the specification. Itanium's story mirrors that of VLIW — an architecture too ambitious for its time that ultimately cemented the dominance of the architecture it sought to replace.