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To my understanding Intel tried to move from x86 with Itanium. That's the consumers who wanted it to linger around.

For some obscure reason, consumers preferred working compilers and higher performance hardware.

I could not use the Itanium server we had at work as it was reserved for the elite. I can say that my 32 bits single core P4 computer was not faster at number crunching.

As someone who was working on Itanium systems at the time, I can confidently say that "consumers" never had a chance to choose Itanium. It was only available on server hardware and Windows ... will there as a version for it but it was slow ... all the compatibility and performance downsides of M1 Macs, and more power hungry too... practically no upside.

It is still a common belief Intel created the Itanium to fool the proprietary unix vendors into thinking they can stop developing their own RISC CPU, but as soon as it happened, Intel gave up on Itanium as well. Solaris lasted a little bit longer only because Sun gave up early on Itanium.

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