They had to do with how Intel was going to turn the inside of their x86 chips into something resembling RISC chips.

Um, they spent a gigabuck and drove DEC and HP out of the market.

I'd say that kicked butt.

HP saw that they couldn't compete with PA against Power, MIPS, Sparc, and Alpha. So they threw in with Intel to develop Itanium in order to be competitive. Intel saw the lucrative server market. Too bad Intel took too long to ship Merced (the first Itanic) At least we got the C++ ABI out of it?