The merced / itanic hype contributed greatly to killing off most of the vibrant bazaar of 90s RISC architectures . Eg, Alpha, PA-RISC, SGI mips64. Sun's Sparc and IBM's power were the few high-end RISC chips to survive the itanic hype.
As a huge alpha fan (user since 1992, helped/maintained the FreeBSD/alpha port, etc), I was so happy when AMD's amd64 beat itanic in the market, and when Intel finally killed the itanic I was ecstatic.
The recent Ryzen/ARM offensive makes me happy for similar reasons (and I even bought Bulldozer-era AMD processors because I didn’t like the idea of buying from Intel)
As a huge alpha fan (user since 1992, helped/maintained the FreeBSD/alpha port, etc), I was so happy when AMD's amd64 beat itanic in the market, and when Intel finally killed the itanic I was ecstatic.