Itanium ran from 2001 to 2019...18 years is hardly a failure, AMD athlon was produced for way shorter and so was FX.
It had a small adoption rate but if that's enough to be called a failure then anything from AMD would be called a failure.
from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Market_share :
"
By 2006, HP manufactured at least 80% of all Itanium systems, and sold 7,200 in the first quarter of 2006.The bulk of systems sold were enterprise servers and machines for large-scale technical computing, with an average selling price per system in excess of US$200,000. A typical system uses eight or more Itanium processors.
By 2012, only a few manufacturers offered Itanium systems, including HP, Bull, NEC, Inspur and Huawei. In addition, Intel offered a chassis that could be used by system integrators to build Itanium systems.
By 2015, only HP supplied Itanium-based systems. With HP split in late 2015, Itanium systems (branded as Integrity) are handled by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), with recent major update in 2017 (Integrity i6, and HP-UX 11i v3 Update 16). HPE also supports a few other operating systems, including Windows up to Server 2008 R2, Linux, OpenVMS and NonStop. "
considering HP was pretty much the only major supplier of itanium based servers for most of its life, it indeed could be labeled as a failure. as it wasnt adopted by anyone other then HP, but HP kinda of had to push it, as they were also part of its development.
https://www.extremetech.com/computi...anium-9700-series-cpu-finally-officially-dies
"
Of course, technical reasons aren’t the only reason why Itanium failed. The chips were expensive, difficult to manufacture, and years behind schedule. Intel made a high-profile declaration that Itanium was the future of computing and represented its only 64-bit platform. Then AMD announced its own AMD64 instruction set, which extended 64-bit computing to the x86 architecture. Intel didn’t change course immediately, but it eventually cross-licensed AMD64. This was a tacit admission that Itanium would never come to the desktop. Then, a few years ago, a high-profile court case between Oracle and HP put a nail in Itanium’s coffin. Today’s chips are the very definition of a contract fulfillment, with no improvements, cache tweaks, or other architectural boosts. "
while you say itanium was made until 2019. as the extremetech article states, "
Today’s chips are the very definition of a contract fulfillment, with no improvements, cache tweaks, or other architectural boosts. " so intel HAD to keep making itanium based cpus, and they did, while barely updating them, ( the 9740 is literally the same chip as the 9540, with the exact same clock speed.) so out of 18 years, it was only being produced, the last few years of life, was only because of contracts.
AMD athlon was produced for way shorter and so was FX.
the SAME thing could be said about the pentium, Pentium pro, Pentium II and Pentium III whats your point ?
and athlon and FX were brand names, NOT architectures
AMD's x86-x64 band aid gave developers the out they needed
and there in essence is a jab at amd, that i was expecting. i dont think i have seen yet, you say anything that is positive towards amd. while intel was trying to start from a clean slate with ai64, it SHOULD of realized the push back it would of gotten. and tried to at least get x86 to run better then it did on Merced, in essence, do what amd64 did, run 32bit code well enough, that it would of given companies time to keep old software, while they migrated to ia64, amd saw this, and took advantage of it. it works with the apple eco system, probably only because it is such a closed eco system, and as watzupken said, is probably part of the reason as well.