Mobile is expected to run JIT translated code. Itanium's design was finalized before JIT became important. Suddenly JIT was everywhere and spreading: Java, C#

Mobile is expected to run JIT translated code. Itanium's design was finalized before JIT became important. Suddenly JIT was everywhere and spreading: Java, C# .net CLR stuff, Javascript, and more. JIT output can not be well-optimized because that takes too long. The code must compile while the end-user waits, so there is no time to do anything good. The code will be terrible. Itanium can't handle that.