There are serious limitations on what you can actually do on a GPU - some operations are terribly slow, and flipping back to the CPU to carry them out is also s

There are serious limitations on what you can actually do on a GPU - some operations are terribly slow, and flipping back to the CPU to carry them out is also slow. They're great for embarrassingly-parallel simple operations, but once you break the ceiling on complexity you're often better off trying to vectorize it on the CPU rather than try and manage all this chatter between the CPU and GPU. Itanium seems like it fits nicely in that space - operations complex enough to be very painful on a graphics processor, but parallel enough for you to actually consider using a GPU in the first place.