Itanium, was Re: HP & Compaq

Again, Itanium is more or less what HP already had in sight as a replacement/successor to PA-RISC even before it was called Mercer/IA64/Itanium. HP had intended the architecture to feature many parallel resources (which IA64 will have), multi-instruction set with dynamic switching (which IA64 will have) and a sophisticated instruction scheduler that would have optimized the utilization of the chip resources to achieve maximum parallelism, instead of relying on the compiler to do the optimal scheduling. HP holds patents on all of these features. When the alliance with Intel came up, they dropped the last feature from the design and went back to the schedule-optimizing compiler paradigm. I am sure that Intel then pressed to include features that they deemed "convenient". In any event, Itanium is more a brainchild of HP than of Intel.