I had to maintain an IA-64 Linux system at a previous job, and it was such an odd duck. The OS did a decent job of abstracting away most of the weirdness, but at the end of the day it was just a very slow server. The compiler breakthroughs that Intel was counting on to make it competitive never happened, and since its unusual architecture made it bad at running code not specifically tuned to it, the end result was that nothing ran great on it. I’m sure that HP had some highly optimized code that ran like greased lightning, but that never worked its way out to the general public.
I admit that I’m glad Itanium finally died. It killed a lot of other interesting architectures and gave nothing in return.
I admit that I’m glad Itanium finally died. It killed a lot of other interesting architectures and gave nothing in return.