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Will Linux on Itanium be saved? Absolutely not
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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They were interesting, but only good for a very narrow purpose - not really a good thing when the trend back then was going away from special purpose machines toward general purpose.
intel didn't plan it to be just a special purpose CPU - but it just ended up that way. That they gave their first customers free Alpha workstations for crosscompiling code as that was faster than native compilation should tell you everything you need to know about suitability of itanic as general purpose system.
I never used Itanium, but I'm guessing that the Alpha workstations also ran x86 code faster than the Itaniums. fx!32 was one of DEC's marvels that they completely forgot to market.
Yeah, but x86 was relatively cheap. Alpha and Itanium were in a similar price range.
At that time Alpha belonged to Compaq - and they stopped Alpha development (and canned quite a few good designs which were pretty much ready to go), expecting they'll be able to replace it with Itanium.