Itanium was once meant to be the next step in computing, to compete with the likes of IBM, Sun and DEC, but also for Intel to have an architecture that couldn’t be taken from it, as the PC was from IBM by its clones. Today, however, Itanium is a relic of the past. [Asianometry] tells us the story of Itanium.

By the ’90s, servers were an established market dominated by RISC architectures and Unix-like operating systems. Intel wanted to compete in this market, due in part to worries of losing control over x86. So, when Hewlett Packard came to Intel in late ’93, Intel eventually agreed to collaborate on a new project in EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing).
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