[GrilledChips]

It's kind of funny. There are lots of architectures it killed (Alpha, PA-RISC, basically everything except SPARC because Sun was sceptical) but basically all of them have outlived it in the linux kernel.

It killed their manufacturing based on hype, where as they all established a firm install base before itanium ever got rolling, which has ensured they continue to be (halfheartedly) maintained.

[cbmuser]

Itanium was killed because unlike all the other architectures it puts a rather big burden on upstream developers due its complicated design (dual stack with growth into two directions, complicated compiler optimizations etc).

[usrusr]

I keep wondering if it perhaps simply appeared too early. These days it feels as if almost everything is either open source or runs in some form of JIT compile VM, or both. Back then it was a huge problem to require code to be compiled not just to the general architecture but to the specific model to be fast.

But today? Moving some of the adaptions from the hardware scheduler to process lifetime persistence (as in JIT VM) or even into the software distribution infrastructure could be delightfully transparent.