> It was called Itanium and it went nowhere. It was popular in its intended niche (HPC) for a while, but the value proposition was not sufficient. It dropped s

> It was called Itanium and it went nowhere. It was popular in its intended niche (HPC) for a while, but the value proposition was not sufficient. It dropped some x86 baggage but it didn't add anything fundamentally superior on top of it -- the ILP could easily be attained by having more cores on x86. To be honest I actually really like what they did with Itanium, but it wasn't a good enough innovation to break off the family line of backwards compatibility.