[dogma1138]

I’m not sure Itanium was a technical failure, to me it always was a business model failure as that CPU was co-developed with HP and essentially became a dedicated HP-Oracle box and by the time the ecosystem was opened up it was too late.

The heavy reliance on the compiler for ILP was an “odd-choice” but not something that was unsound in principle.

If the ecosystem was more open from the get go and more vendors were involved it had a much better chance of taking off.

And if nothing else at least it was something new.

The biggest disappointment I have with Itanium is that it and later Larabee/XeonPhi kinda pushed Intel even further into their own little x86 box when it came to processing units.

I think that failure is also why they haven’t really done anything interesting with Altera.

[ece]

They do have Xe-graphics now. It's the closed Intel has come to a competitive non-x86 part in recent memory. It feels kind of forced though, everyone else has their own CPU+GPU now including Apple/Nvidia in addition to AMD/QC, so why wouldn't Intel? They also have OneAPI.

It would be interesting to see an explicitly JIT-based approach to ILP.