> Had it not been the case, and everyone would be using Itanium no matter what.

That's quite a strong statement.

It is the hard reality, no AMD64, Itanium would have been the only 64 bit CPU successor for x86 coming out from Intel.

Take it or leave it, and with Wintel going Itanium, that would be it.

Today not 'everyone' is using x86 - by a long margin - so it's a bit of a stretch to say that in a hypothetical alternative history an architecture that failed in the market would be utterly dominant.

85% of desktop users and about 90% cloud users certainly are.

Mobile phones and tablets are mostly consumer devices, Apple's ARM laptops are only relevant for about 10% of the desktop market.

Outside embedded devices and electronic appliances, every other CPU is a rounding error in what concerns the general public.

If you exclude everything that does not go into your direction and make the hypothesis that a poor architecture would have risen and then would not have been replaced, you conclude that "everybody" would use it?

Without AMD64, Windows and UNIX would, that is what matters in this context.

So not everyone, even in your chosen subset of the market.

It is a matter of market share.

No people would just use 32 bit x86 and continue with that for many more years and move to SPARC/PowerPC for the few cases where you really need 64 bit.

People not just gone use really bad processors because they have no other options.

Assuming Sun and IBM would sell them to Microsoft outside their own UNIX and mainframes usage.

Apparently people didn't have any problem using the bad 80x86 architecture like so many complain around here.

This was right in the time period of Windows Everywhere. Windows on MIPS, Alpha and so on. And for server workloads just using going to Unix is totally fine.

People would rather run server workloads on Unix rather then using windows with shitty expensive processors.

People that are unwilling to move to Unix very likely just stick around on 32bit instead.

That version of Windows died with NT 4.0, several years before Itanium was a product.

We were running Windows 2000 in production, alongside Aix, HP-UX and Solaris workloads across all our customers back in 1999 - 2003, before we got hit in the first .com startup crysis.