Intel has had some bad luck trying to move past x86. ia432, i860, i960 (which found niche markets), and ia64.<p>The revisions to the sales forecasts from market research companies were ugly <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_e...</a><p>And it killed MIPS and ALPHA architectures on the server, but I guess ended up pushing everyone towards x86 while ia64 was delayed until AMD jumped in an released x86-64.
Several years ago Oracle posted some very amusing HP internal documents about their Itanium efforts:<p><a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/itanium-346707.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/itanium-346707.h...</a>
They complained to be screwed by Google with Java, that is false, but at the same time are not afraid to screw HP. They had a contract to a long term support of Itanium and dropped it after one year to annoy HP (there were several trials between the two companies at this moment).
OUCH.<p>It's weird that companies that companies who compete so fiercely in the same markets really ever manage to work together. Once Oracle became a systems manufacturer HP had to know that they would boff them.<p>From a technical perspective, the stuff that HP has in Nonstop, OpenVMS, and Super Dome are really impressive. I read that they sold OpenVMS to a third party that is busy porting to x64. Looking forward to running it in VM's for fun...because I have a weird sense of fun. Stop judging me.
Mentioned in the article but always amazing - Bryan Cantrill on Oracle killing Open Source: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc</a><p>"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"
From the article: In a statement, Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley said the company had been providing all its latest software for Itanium servers since Kleinberg's decision.<p>So does this mean they actually continued to work on it, but just told HP there was no market and had stopped work?
I heard at a conference from some HP exec, that they sold loads of HP Integrity servers to Asian customers mainly so that they could host MS SQL Server on those big boxes, which I found surprising