EPIC development at HP started in 01989, and the Intel collaboration was publicly announced in 01994. The planned ship date for Merced, the first Itanic, was 01998, and it was first floorplanned in 01996, the year Java was announced. Merced finally taped out in July 01999, three months after the first JIT option for the JVM shipped. Nobody was assuming that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century at that time, although there were some promising signs from Self and Strongtalk that maybe they could be half as fast as C.
By the time IA-64 actually got close to shipping Intel was certainly talking about JIT being a factor in its success. At least that was mentioned in the marketing guff they were putting out.
You mean, in 01999? I'd have to see that, because my recollection of that time is that JIT was generally considered unproven (and Java slow). That was 9 years before Chrome shipped the first JavaScript JIT, for example. The only existing commercial products using JIT were Smalltalk implementations like VisualAge, which were also slow. Even HP's "Dynamo" research prototype paper wasn't published until 02000.
Wikipedia tells me that Merced shipped in May 2001, which matches my recollection of not actually seeing a manufacturer’s sample until about then. That box was the largest computer I had ever seen and had so many fans it sounded like an engine. It was also significantly slower than the cheap x86 clones we had on own desks at running general purpose software.
JIT compilation was available before but became the default in Java1.3, released a year earlier to incredible hype.
Also back then the hype was more important than the reality in many cases. The JIT hype was everywhere and reached a “of course everyone will use it” kind of like AI is at right now.
EPIC development at HP started in 01989, and the Intel collaboration was publicly announced in 01994. The planned ship date for Merced, the first Itanic, was 01998, and it was first floorplanned in 01996, the year Java was announced. Merced finally taped out in July 01999, three months after the first JIT option for the JVM shipped. Nobody was assuming that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century at that time, although there were some promising signs from Self and Strongtalk that maybe they could be half as fast as C.