believe that it was no longer cost-effective for individual enterprise systems companies such as itself to develop proprietary microprocessors. Intel had also been researching several architectural options for going beyond the x86 ISA to address high-end enterprise server and high-performance computing (HPC) requirements.

Intel and HP partnered in 1994 to develop the IA-64 ISA, using a variation of VLIW design concepts which Intel named explicitly parallel instruction computing