alt Hacker NewsIt's unclear to me what would have likely happened had AMD stayed on IA32 and Netburst been uncontested. Itanium was far too expensive for consumer machines and it seems very possible that Intel would have fumbled IA64 in a way similar to more recent AVX-512 and their big.little efforts. Easy enough to port XP to Itanium, hard to get those machines into Best Buy or the Dell catalog in any way that makes sense. Had AMD continued Athlon performance improvements and Intel still responded with a P6-derived Pentium M (which even in our timeline was 32-bit) it still seems like there would have been no volume market for IA64 and we still would have eventually ended up with an evolution of IA32 even if it came from Intel instead of AMD.
It is all what ifs by now, however I firmly believe if there was no other option other than Wintel, Intel would keep pushing Itanium and sort out the design issues.
The thing with AMD64 is that now there is this myth that there was no other alternative than keeping up with x86, and Itanium redesigns for some magical reason were impossible.
Other than those redesigns never happened, because AMD64 made economic invalid to pursue them.