What are the technical reasons behind the "Itanium fiasco", if any?

Answer 1

It was very hard to write code generators for; and it didn't have much reasons to succeed in the first place (It was made by Intel, so what?).

I've heard some JITs gave worse perfomance than interpreters on Itanium because gcc optimized interpreter better; that's a no-go if a processor requires that level of optimizations.

Non-mainstream RISCs are losing grounds; They didn't see that or hoped it would become mainstream; too bad it wouldn't because there weren't any reasons for that.

Answer 2

Simple. It wasn't x86 compatible. That's why x86_64 chips are.

Answer 3

I think Itanium still has its market - high end systems and HP blade servers. Performance is still much higher compared to x86. I'm not sure why would some one call it a failure when it is generating billions of $ for HP (although it is not just the processor; it is itanium server sales that is generating revenue).

Answer 4

I read that article, and I'm completely missing the "fiasco" he refers to. As he mentions near the end, at the mere sight of Itanium, "one promising project after another was dropped". MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC -- gone. Sun has cancelled their last two big Sparc projects, though it wasn't exactly a big seller even before those. PowerPC is only surviving in the embedded space.

How is Intel killing off all the competition, using a single product line, anything but the greatest microprocessor victory of all time? I'm sure they weren't smart enough to have anticipated this, but even if they knew it would fail, throwing a few $billion at a feint worked wonderfully. Apparently they could afford it, and everybody else just dropped dead.

On the desktop, in the server room, and even in supercomputers (87% of the top-500 list), it's x86-compatible as far as the eye can see. If that's the result of an Intel "fiasco", then what words are left for the processors that didn't make it?

Intel and Itanium, in my book, ranks up there with Microsoft and MS-DOS: despite how lousy it may have been technically, it enabled them to utterly dominate the industry.

EDIT: And Itanium had x86 compatibility from day 1, so that's not it. It was slow, but it was there.