Comment by whoopdedo

I'd say no. We would have had the Itanium drama 10 years earlier. The i860 had some flashy features in it (integrated graphics, SIMD) but also the same Achilles' heel as Itanium of compiler-directed pipeline ordering. That made it much slower than other processors and any analyst of the time would have recommended staying on x86 for the performance and not having to change all your software. So AMD and Cyrix sell more chips and Intel has to backpedal to avoid completely losing the PC market.