I was at that Stanford lecture! Assuming it was the one that I attended, the Intel engineer was John Crawford, the lead architect of Merced -- and John Hennessy was absolutely annihilating him. I described attending that lecture in a Reddit AMA years ago [0]:

In fact, allow me to tell a story: as a young engineer, I attended a talk at Stanford, by John Crawford, architect of the Itanium (then known as Merced). He was presenting a bunch of benchmarks that seemed... dubious. And while Merced kicked butt on Eight Queens, it was terrible on gcc (and everything else that looked vaguely real-world). Even as brash as I might have been (ahem), I wasn't about to say anything, but then some guy in the back of the room just got on Crawford on this. Crawford tried to shake him off, but the guy was just a badger, at one point saying "Doesn't this just willfully ignore everything we've learned about commercial workloads over the last decade?" At this point, I turned around -- who the hell was this guy?! -- and saw that it was none other than John Hennessy himself. A Silicon Valley gangland slaying if ever there was one -- and told me everything I (or anyone) needed to know about Itanium's fate.

The room was packed (and open to non-Stanford students, which is how I got there); glad to know I wasn't the only one on whom this made an impact!

[0] https://i.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_of_...