Intel Corp (INTC)

[mas]

One of the architects of Willamette told me they debated back
and forth whether to make the original P4 uarch 64 bit or not.
This was at a time before 1) AMD disclosed the fact that it was
working on x86-64 and 2) Merced ran into development problems
(all major OEMs were still publicly pledging to support IPF). If it came down from the top that Itanium would be the only 64 bit architecture supported by Intel then there would have been
nothing for the P4 team to debate.

Would it have been activated though if PA-WW -> EPIC -> Itanium had proved a big a success as hoped for in 64-bit and overall performance ? Prescott's 64-bitness was only revealed/activated once 64-bit Opteron started getting some traction. The account of Bob Cowell showed there were definitely two opposing camps in the design space, x86 and Itanium, that acted like ruthless internal competitors. Maybe Craig Barrett's plan was to let them both do their own thing and see who came through for him in execution as the one link I previously posted from him around that time showed him to be cautious when questioned about future architecture path albeit leaning in Itanium's direction. Definitely Itanium would have been the preferred winner as it was totally proprietary and would have cut out all the x86 licensees (e.g. AMD/VIA/IBM) from the leading edge loop ... forever.