I disagree that parallelization is abnormally difficult. We just don't yet have the tools to help. It is like trying to do objected oriented programming back

I disagree that parallelization is abnormally difficult. We just don't yet have the tools to help. It is like trying to do objected oriented programming back in the assembly language days: to be avoided except where absolutely necessary. With appropriate library support, many personal computing tasks are amenable to map-reduce approaches. Can you think of any highly serial desktop apps? All I come up with is certain spreadsheets, and the final step of assigning page breaks during document pagination. What killed Itanium was Intel's childish obsession with clock rate and single-threaded performance. It turned out that back end software was limited by off-chip bandwidth and had already been forced to parallelize at any cost, while front end software was slowed down by trivially parallelizable graphics and signal processing. Itanium is an excellent solution, just to the wrong problem.