Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what point Dvorak is even making in that article. Yeah, a lot of ultimately wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64 plus a somewhat diminished set of CPUs from some of the big Unix vendors. It's an interesting question but I'm ultimately not sure that the computer industry would look all that different today had Intel just done 64-bit extensions to x86 or something similarly evolutio…
X86-64/AMD64 was solely developed by AMD and licensed to Intel. I'm stating this because I can't tell what you mean by: "wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64"
What I last statement meant was we ended up by an industry dominated by 64-bit x86 anyway in spite of all the effort that went into an alternative 64-bit architecture. So we’d probably be in a similar place had Intel just decided Itanium was a bad idea from the start.