Hm. I'd say Mill requires an even more ambitious compiler than Itanium. Itanium's large number of registers, for example, was friendly for existing compilers, w

Hm. I'd say Mill requires an even more ambitious compiler than Itanium. Itanium's large number of registers, for example, was friendly for existing compilers, while I don't know how compilers will handle the whole belt thing. Incidentally, I don't think the Itanium compiler tech never materialized, it just materialized late. Itanium had a lot of other problems, but the later Itanium models really flew for certain workloads (SQL Server, in particular). After the first one (which was quite a dud and killed Itanium's reputation), Itanium was definitely not slow. The x86 emulator was slow, and AMD64 absolutely stole Itanium's lunch.