alt Hacker NewsFirst thank you for generously understanding my post despite the vandalism that autocorrect did to it.
WindowsNT is remarkably well suited to porting to other arch. This was done on purpose to hedge against x86. Dead one day, reactivated the other. MS needed to brake the 4Gb barrier and they would have done anything to get consumer priced 64bit chips.
Itanium was a dog. We had an Itanium SGI "supercomputer". Everything about it that SGI designed was amazing (hot swapping cpus). The cpu was a dog.
Itanium wasn't set in stone, a few times CPUs were redesigned to fix architecture issues, naturally for WinIntel that became economic unfeasible the moment AMD64 became an alternative.
Without it, Intel would most likely kept iterating and improving Itanium's architecture.