Re: "Intel has tremendous amounts of institutional [money]"
"You make soem good points "
That's what we're here for.
"Intel released Merced in June 2001.The first AMD64 chips were released in April 2003. You make soem good points but chosen to base your whole argument on a factual inaccuracy."
Rather depends on how you want to define "released" vs "slideware/relevant/etc)" (and arguably on my oversimplification, for which I apologise). More detailed info can be found via e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64#Itanium_2:_2002%E2%80%932010
When did IA64 become relevant in usable affordable competitive offerings (in systems with applications, stuff that volume customers were willing to pay for with their own money), rather than Intel/HP slideware? Merced never really was, things did briefly improve later, but by then AMD64 was well established.
AMD64 architecture was announced in 2001 and started shipping in relevant systems (which were fundamentally x86-compatible) around 2003; look it up. Once that happened, the writing was pretty much on the wall for IA64.
Don't take my word for it, ask AMD's lead architect for K8, who left AMD to later work at Apple and elsewhere, and more recently has been recruited to sort out chip design and manufacture problems at Intel. In between times he also co-architected HyperTransport and similar stuff.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/why-rock-star-chip-architect-jim-keller-finally-decided-to-work-for-intel/