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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by chrishacken on Thursday December 08, 2016 @08:36AM (#13130153)
I have a feeling that the market rejected it because rewriting a ton of software didn't make sense for a negligible performance "upgrade", not because it wasn't backwards compatible. There were also emulators available to run x86 code.

> When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. - Wikipedia

Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ... by 0xcde4c3db on Thursday December 08, 2016 @10:10AM (#13130723)
I think the backwards compatibility problem wasn't that it lacked backwards compatibility, but rather that the proposition was to pay more to run your existing binaries slower. I recall Pentium Pro having a similar problem with 16-bit code.