The article makes it sound like Itanium was some genius move on Intel's part to kill off the old workstation market, but IMHO that's exactly the opposite. This was Intel spending god knows how much money to jump into the workstation market right as it was suffering its final death throes from fatal wounding it took from the PC clone market.
Sure those workstations were powerful and had impeccable engineering, but they also cost at least 5 times as much as a similarly powerful PC. Sometimes more a full order of magnitude more. Plus they were full of obnoxious licensing requirements, like making you purchase a compiler for thousands of dollars per year or requiring you to buy an obscenely overpriced support contract to get OS updates. They just couldn't complete with some cheap clone running Linux, especially as Intel poured way more money into R&D each year and overtook the workstation chips. By the time the Core architecture, and especially Conroe, were released those old workstations had nothing going for them but inertia.
Sure those workstations were powerful and had impeccable engineering, but they also cost at least 5 times as much as a similarly powerful PC. Sometimes more a full order of magnitude more. Plus they were full of obnoxious licensing requirements, like making you purchase a compiler for thousands of dollars per year or requiring you to buy an obscenely overpriced support contract to get OS updates. They just couldn't complete with some cheap clone running Linux, especially as Intel poured way more money into R&D each year and overtook the workstation chips. By the time the Core architecture, and especially Conroe, were released those old workstations had nothing going for them but inertia.