Itanium was good for high performance computing -- numerical simulations of physical phenomena. That's what I used it for. It was ok-to-poor for other workloads

Itanium was good for high performance computing -- numerical simulations of physical phenomena. That's what I used it for. It was ok-to-poor for other workloads. I seem to recall basic utilities like "grep" being slower on my expensive employer-provided Linux/Itanium 2 workstation than on my budget x86/Linux desktop. I can believe than a new VLIW processor can indeed perform well on HPC and ML workloads. But that doesn't sound particularly "universal" to me. Will people get good performance running relational databases on it? Graph algorithms? Compilers? Existing Java applications?