This article is filled with misinformation that any journalist should be ashamed of getting wrong. For example:<p>> where "64-bit" is immediately understood to mean x86-64 — because who wants a computer that can't natively run most applications made for a PC?<p>Huh? Sure, when people hear "64 bit", they don't think about Alpha, UltraSPARC or Power, but I don't think "64 bit" universally makes people think about x86-64, considering the ubiquity of 64 bit ARM CPUs in practically everyone's pockets. And "most applications made for a PC" has very little to do with whether something is 64 bits or not.<p>> the pure 64-bit architecture of Intel Itanium did not allow 32-bit (x86) applications to run natively<p>They were totally different instruction sets, so this had almost nothing to do with 32 versus 64 bit. The Itanic even had support meant to accelerate emulation of 32 bit x86, so if anything, Itanic would've performed dismally running 64 bit x86 code compared with 32 bit x86 or native Itanic code.<p>> Itanium landed with a thud in the market despite being among the first to the 64-bit punch<p>Itanic was late in the 64 bit world. Alpha, UltraSPARC, MIPS and even Power had 64 bit long before the 2001 introduction of the Itanic. AMD had already announced their spec and had development environments and toolchain support for x86-64 before Intel's Itanic release.<p>> However, the story of Intel Itanium doesn't quite end at the launch of AMD64/x86-64 in 2003 despite the obvious chilling effect. Itanium still kept support and was iterated on until February 2017, and shipments didn't completely halt until July 2021. For some fringe scenarios, Itanium was very performant and even ideal.<p>No. No, it wasn't. This tries to make Itanic seem like it was good enough to hold on until 2017, which is definitely <i>not</i> the case - Intel threw literally billions of dollars at the Itanic, but it really sucked. It never had any real edge over any of its contemporaries - not in raw performance, not in price per FLOPS or MIPS, not in aggregate performance. It was Intel proving that they're a one trick pony, which they still haven't figured out.<p>Aside from ethernet chips and x86, Intel has failed at everything - at embedded processors (Atoms have typically been woefully underpowered and have had reliability issues, like bricked Cisco routers), at broadband chips (see the Puma chipset debacle), at CPUs for embedded devices (even their modern "e" core devices like the N200 can't compete in performance per watt compared with ARM, and are too power hungry for anything you'd want to actually put in your pocket), at cellular chipsets, and so on.<p>Don't take my word for it. The Register does an excellent job of calling Intel out for their lackluster products and inability to compete outside of x86 (and problems competing inside of x86).