wbmw, initially Intel did quite a bit to seed the industry for i860, developed under the internal name NT for "New Technology". As a footnote to history, Microsoft developed their 32-bit OS, WindowsNT, first for the prototype Intel NT processor but changed to Mips later when it became apparent that Intel's processor was being sidelined.
What happened to the NT (i860) processor? Simple. Intel's development caused an internal competition between RISC and CISC; the CISC folks started cranking up the clock rate on the 486 (producing the DX2) and concurrently set up a separate effort to develope the 586 (released as Pentium). The 586 incorporated whatever ideas they can borrow from the RISC processors in the industry, and really produced a merged architecture (except not enough registers). Bottom line: The CISC group proved to management that they can make a processor that kept up with the newest RISC processors, so there was no need to 'risk' everything on an untried instruction set.
The i860 was repositioned as a controller processor and Microsoft switched development to Mips and 386/486 for WinNT.
I do agree that Intel pulled the plug on i860 at a much earlier stage than Itanium - the i860 never saw the light of day as a general purpose processor, and Itanium attempts to be such (at least for servers). However, the history of the i432 and i860 shows that Intel knows how to cut losses and move on when the have to - Itanium will have to succeed and outcompete x86 designs, or Intel will do the same again.
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