That's kind of my point. We didn't need some new, speculative, architectural innovation. We would have been better served investing those Itanium dollars in pushing the mature technology which ran the software we wanted to run better. "Genuine innovation" is often an academic exercise, rather than market changing, though we often don't figure that out until later.

Not sure I'd say the 21364 was PPro since as pointed out it came before 21264. There's clearly some crossbreeding tho. The Alpha bus interface did live on in Athlon, tho.