Register windows were one of the few things that worked well in Itanium. I ran some networking benchmarks (interrupt and function call heavy code) on the first

Register windows were one of the few things that worked well in Itanium. I ran some networking benchmarks (interrupt and function call heavy code) on the first generation hardware and the combination of efficient hardware register spills combined with pretty massive memory bandwidth compared to x86 at the time lead to quite impressive results. Sadly, it took ages for the first gen hardware to ship, plus it had this huge chunk of a useless x86 core taking up valuable die space. And I stubbed my toe on that machine way too much...