The merced / itanic hype contributed greatly to killing off most of the vibrant bazaar of 90s RISC architectures . Eg, Alpha, PA-RISC, SGI mips64. Sun's Sparc and IBM's power were the few high-end RISC chips to survive the itanic hype.

As a huge alpha fan (user since 1992, helped/maintained the FreeBSD/alpha port, etc), I was so happy when AMD's amd64 beat itanic in the market, and when Intel finally killed the itanic I was ecstatic.

The recent Ryzen/ARM offensive makes me happy for similar reasons (and I even bought Bulldozer-era AMD processors because I didn’t like the idea of buying from Intel)

I remember ordering a free copy of the IA64 architecture book from Intel in the early 2000's(actual paper even!) thinking I was getting some head start on the future of computing(when it was clear that Alpha wasn't going to happen), but that never panned out. Clearly I've got a poor track record in guessing the path of CPU architecture(I even went 32-bit Core Duo over AMD64, once I got disillusioned over the idea of "better tech" winning out), so I'm still hoping that my buying an M1 Macbook Air doesn't doom Apple's move to ARM.

RISC-V may win over ARM. Would be nice.