Also, hardware has a lifecycle. At some point the old hardware isn't worth running in a large scale operation because it consumes more in electricity to run 24/7 than it would cost to replace with newer hardware. But then it falls into the hands of people who aren't going to run it 24/7, like hobbyists and students, which as a manufacturer you still want to support because that's how you get people to invest their time in your stuff instead of a competitor's.
Yesterday I thought about installing and trying to use https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=39372159 (Reor is an open-source AI note-taking app that runs models locally.) and feed it my markdown folder but I stop midway, asking myself "don't I need some kind of powerful GPU for that ?". And now I am thinking "wait, should I wait for `standard` pluggable AI computing hardware device ? Is that Intel Gaudi 3 something like that ?".
Modern CPUs have moved towards becoming simpler and more flexible in their execution with specialized hardware (GPUs, etc) for the more parallel and repetitive tasks that Itanium excelled at.
Had it not happened, PC makers wouldn't have had any other alternative other than buy PCs with Windows / Itanium, no matter what.
At Itanium's launch, an x86 Windows Server could use Physical Address Extension to support 128GBs of RAM. In an alt timeline where x86-64 never happened, we'd have likely seen PAE perk down to consumer level operating systems to support greater than 4GB of RAM. It was supported on all popular consumer x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD at the time.
The primary reasons we have the technologies we have today was wide availability and wide support. Itanium never achieved either. In a timeline without x86-64 there might have been room for IBM Power to compete with Xeon/Opteron/Itanium. The console wars would have still developed the underlying technologies used by Nvidia for it's ML products, and Intel would likely be devoting resource into making Itanium an ML powerhouse.
We'd be stuck with x86, ARM or Power as a desktop option.
I truly do hope it is successful so we can have some alternative accelerators.