[xscott]

Yeah, there's a whole other universe of specialized chips for special purposes, and I used PCI-style DSP cards when I could. I just think a standard VLIW on the desktop/server would've been useful for the stuff I'm interested in.

GPUs can definitely carry that load, but I avoided them in my career because I could rarely guarantee that my customer's computers would have a sufficient GPU. In the world where I worked, x86 and AMD64 became standard - I could always count on that. It had to be a pretty special project for my customers to let me dictate a dedicated rack of specific hardware was required.

> Intel and HP had hundreds of smart people trying to solve the "software problem" of Itanium and they did not succeed.

Yeah, but that's tied up in the market too. A big name customer screaming, "But I don't want to retrain my programmers, it has to work with Java/C++" would certainly sway them from a Verilog or Cuda style language. Hell even OpenCL and Cuda have to look like C++. Double hell, the FPGA folks have been trying to make a C++-like language for decades so that they can increase their market. That doesn't mean another possibility couldn't exist for Itanium.

It's very clear that Itanium is dead. Maybe I'm just saying the market was foolish, and you're saying Intel/HP couldn't satisfy the market.