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As someone working in that space at that time, IA64 was still losing to Sparc64 the entire time. We would do big boxes on Solaris and replace older Sun boxes with ia32 Pentium Pros. There wasn't really ever a point at which we thought "hm, RISC isn't working for us, we need VLIW" ...and we were an HP shop!!!

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Sun was one of the few processor makers who were sceptical and decided to wait and see before cancelling plans for their architecture, and it's nice to hear that worked out for them for a bit before 64-bit x86 ate their lunch.

Of course, it's also possible that by that point Sun was already paralysed by infighting between various splinter groups, with no big bad DEC to fight against.

The irony being that Itanium is basically a SPARC64 on steroids; both wide, both used huge register windows, and both were in order. the only difference being that Itanium exposed a lot of the superscalar bits to the programmer. I still have no clue why an HP shop would be using Solaris boxes, alas...

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