It's sad that actual 64-bit processor architectures haven't taken off in the mainstream. Between Itanium, DEC Alpha, Sparc, Power (though Sparc & Power9 is still around) and I'm sure there are others, the market had a future that could have been ramped up much like the current (polish a turd) x86 architecture (which is actually IA-32 for Intel and RISC64 for AMD via NexGen). Now with x86 we are very incrementally increasing actual performance and we could have seen a bigger leap by now. Of course that requires everyone to adopt 64-bit processing and a lot of code would have to be redone no matter where you run it. It's not just 64-bit memory addressing which didn't necessarily need such a major overhaul.
Oh well, such is life.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
