The fact that Itanium didn't take off as expected is really because it is only in certain types of applications such as databases that there was a driving need to go beyond 32-bit to the larger memory you see in RISC servers today. But 64-bit extensions to x86 are here, and there is no penalty to having a server that is capable of supporting 64-bit, whether you need it or not. That's the nice thing about the x64 approach.