In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Robert Myers wrote in part:
Without AMD, one of threee things would have happened:
1. Intel would have had the resources to deliver a satisfactory
Itanium product and accompanying compiler on schedule.

Are you joking? AFAICS, Intel threw money and people at Itanium
well past the point of diminishing returns into the region of
negative returns (were additional people/resources consumed more
communications and managment than their contribution to the project).

Itanium did not fail for lack of resources. It might have failed
from a surfeit. Dis-economies of scale are real and a constant
peril in large projects.

2. Intel would have been forced into a partial retreat to x86, anyway.

Would it have been any more graceful than P4, ie an overclocked
original Pentium? Perhaps. It could hardly be worse.
Without AMD breathing down Intel's neck on the performance end,
INTC would have developed and released processors much slower.
There would have been no need.

3. Sparc or Power would be holding much larger market share under
any number of possible licensing and manufacturing arrangements.

Add in Alpha. In addition to the non-x86 code hurdle, they
have identical issues with AMD. None can deliver the sheer
massive volume that Intel can and the PC market demands.

I personally believe that what we've got is the worst of all
possible worlds: AMD on death's door, Microsoft holding on to
its monopoly catering to just one ISA, and, to all intents and
purposes, zero diversity in processor architecture.

I do not agree. Linux and to a lesser extent NetBSD have done
wonders to keep alt-arch alive and vital. ARM is far from dead.
I would not be at all surprised my next PC had one (ASUS EEE-like).

MSFT has been seduced down a dead-end. Sic transit gloria mundi.


-- Robert