YB, you are comparing events in history without regards for the associated reasons. You are therefore not learning anything from history at all.
The i860 died because Intel did nothing to seed the broad based ecosystem. Neither did Intel have the leverage in their own R&D to give the i860 a complete solution.
On the other hand, take Power4, a chip that would be nothing without the backing of IBM, the strong support of AIX, and a broad system infrastructure. Unlike the i860, Itanium architecture also has the support of popular operating systems, software development, and hardware infrastructure. In fact, the amount of support for Itanium dwarfs that of Power architecture.
There are no less than 3 industry leading operating systems that support Itanium architecture - Microsoft Windows, Linux, and HP-UX. There are hundreds of applications that have been ported to Itanium architecture for maximum performance. And there are close to 50 different vendors offering Itanium based systems, including HP, IBM, NEC, SGI, Unisys, Bull, and soon Dell.
Compare that to the i860, which you claimed has died for no other reason than because Intel created it in conjunction with a quickly growing x86 market. Sure, x86 CPUs are popular, and probably here to stay, but the amount of infrastructure for Itanium seems to be worlds better than wht was available for the i860.
When 80386 processor started winning the world it was hardly the fastest. It was probably at the slower side.
Wrong. It was the fastest of the 32 bit CISC chips of its era. It was 25 to 33% faster than the MC68020, twice as fast as the NS32032, and 3 to 4x faster than a uVAX-II or WE32200. The RISC chips that came soon after the 386 were much faster than all these CISC uPs but were too expensive and power hungry for PC applications and were used in engineering workstations and servers priced at $10k and up.
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