The way I see it, the current 64 bit chip makers are too used to fat margins to ever make a volume play. Perhaps one will prove me wrong but right now most appear to be too good a rolling over and playing dead with the approach of the itanic. Thus, I see two paths to nothingness for the itanium.
1) x86-64. The least "painful" path. Everyone gets a "free" backwards compatible upgrade to 64bit. The big downside: it's still x86, just with still more complexity tacked on.
2) embedded assension. Just as intel is using dominance in the desktop to lay seige to high end servers, I can see Intel getting so attached to fat margins that it falls victim to the same play from the embedded world. The risc embedded processors are designed to be everything itanium isn't: simple and efficient.
Perhaps I'm dreaming too much, but I hope for something more power efficient than the itanium ( and to a lesser extent x86 ) to emerge. With the way itanium is going, air cooling soon won't be enough. The costs and hassles of a water cooled computer are not something I look forward to.
Dave "LordBeatnik"