The grand plan of VLIW might not have worked out anyway, but I always wondered what would have happened, if Intel had moved the Itanic to current process nodes,

The grand plan of VLIW might not have worked out anyway, but I always wondered what would have happened, if Intel had moved the Itanic to current process nodes, even without huge modifications. By the transistor count, it could probably be power-efficient enough to drive mobile phones. Also, on the time of its peak, the Itanium did perform quite well, I wonder what it could deliver, if it would be grown to use all of modern production processes. Maybe VLIW cannot be made to work, but I do think that Intel missed the boat by not providing cheap development systems to enthusiasts. Like a PC-compatible motherboard with an Itanium for like 500$. The Linux crowd would have picked it up gladly. Instead, it was only available as espensive hardware, which reduced the potential developer audience (both from the availability of the development resource itself as in the target market). The post mentions, that everyone picks up the new Apple Silicon processors, because they are nice. They certainly are, but the big point is, that a compatible ARM system can be picked up for as little as $35, the Raspberry Pi and its friends. And while Apple hardware isn't low-cost, it is increadibly cheap in comparison to the Itanium systems of that time.