His schtick seems to be "angry man shouting about how new things suck."
He is the bizarro world version of Steven Levy: his default is why something is bad, instead of seeing the possibilities.
AMD might well not exist. But, except for HP, the big Unix vendors mostly hedged their bets anyway. The large Japanese companies who also backed Itanium never were going to make the investments to break out beyond Japan.
Intel's good luck and heavy investment in shrinking node sizes also made it impossible for niche companies to keep up. They were doomed to be slow power hogs in their attempt to keep up with commodity x86 processors.
I'm stating this because I can't tell what you mean by:
"wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64"
What I last statement meant was we ended up by an industry dominated by 64-bit x86 anyway in spite of all the effort that went into an alternative 64-bit architecture. So we’d probably be in a similar place had Intel just decided Itanium was a bad idea from the start.
it’s safe to say that Intel has some sort of contingency plan going back quite a while. Some analysts even thought they saw features in Pentium that suggested 64-bit readiness.
But it wasn’t until Opteron’s success and its adoption by esp. HP and Dell that Intel felt they needed to make their 64 bit extensions plan public.
Random aside: Itanic was HP's brainchild that was adopted and refined at Intel (and far from all of Intel was excited about that). Having experienced a VLIW that _didn't_ suck (the internal engine of Transmeta's Astro 2/Efficieon) I'm sad that EPIC/Itanic gives VLIW as bad name. However, the future belongs to RISC-V.
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp
> The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it?
> The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
> It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above. The next level was the basement, in fact. Hopefully Intel won't come up with any more bright ideas like the Itanium. We can't afford to excavate another level down.