Intel spent a decade and billions on Itanium — the chip the market didn't want

Itanium (IA-64), co-developed by Intel and HP, was intended to be the future of high-end computing: a 64-bit architecture based on EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) that would replace the x86 architecture in servers and workstations. Development began in the early 1990s.

But Itanium was a decade late, and when it shipped in 2001, it was incompatible with the vast ecosystem of existing x86 software. The EPIC architecture required software to be recompiled, and the performance gains did not justify the migration cost. Meanwhile, AMD released x86-64 (Opteron), which added 64-bit support to the existing x86 architecture — a simpler, cheaper path that preserved software compatibility.

The market chose x86-64. Itanium was confined to a niche in high-end HP servers and was discontinued in 2021. The case illustrated the danger of betting on a clean-sheet architecture when an incremental improvement to the existing standard is 'good enough,' and how a decade of development can be wasted by a competitor's simpler solution.