One very good thing came out of the Itanium project: the vendor-independent ABI for C++. IBM, HP, Sun, Intel, and GCC all signed on to rigorously specify the l

One very good thing came out of the Itanium project: the vendor-independent ABI for C++. IBM, HP, Sun, Intel, and GCC all signed on to rigorously specify the layout of C++ objects and the function call interface on the Itanium platform (GCC got funding to help with this) and the processor-independent parts of the standard were then used pretty much everywhere else (with adaptations for different instruction sets to handle the call interface).