For some periods (including during some of the Opteron era) Itanium 2 actually did okay. https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=27345&curpostid=27345 ht

For some periods (including during some of the Opteron era) Itanium 2 actually did okay. https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=27345&curpostid=27345 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=27345&curposti... It had very strong floating point performance and on spec int it was holding pace with Opterons, Athlons and P4s clocked a lot higher. Apparently a lot of the int performance was due to large fast caches (I think it had a bigger die size compared with the others) -- have a look at the 1.5MB version vs the 3MB version. But even there it wasn't doing so bad against the Sun and IBM processors which were out of order I think. So yes you're right some things did run pretty fast. Unfortunately for Itanium, compiler techniques to make up for in-order execution had just about run out of steam at that point, while OOOE continued to scale up and improve steadily. Which is pretty much the opposite of what HP and Intel had predicted in the 90s, which is why they justified Itanium's approach.