They were definitely onto something. They made something competitive performance-wise that wasn't vulnerable to all of these speculative execution vulnerabilities.
Itanium's slowness is generally very exaggerated (at least in part because the first Itanium had a rather slow memory subsystem, and the performance kind of sucked as a result). Circa 2008 or so the fastest database servers available were Itanium. Unfortunately, it emulated x86 extremely slowly and amd64 ran x86 very quickly, so AMD kinda ate Intel's lunch.
If I were at Intel management I might explore with engineering resurrecting the Itanium (rebranded and modernized of course). Today with so much open source there is less instruction set lock in, and with all these vulnerabilities you might be able to market it as a more secure architecture. In that case you might only need to equal x64 performance.
Itanium's slowness is generally very exaggerated (at least in part because the first Itanium had a rather slow memory subsystem, and the performance kind of sucked as a result). Circa 2008 or so the fastest database servers available were Itanium. Unfortunately, it emulated x86 extremely slowly and amd64 ran x86 very quickly, so AMD kinda ate Intel's lunch.