Itanium was a gigabuck and drove everybody out of the high-end processor market except IBM leaving Xeon for Intel to monopolize for a decade+. I'd qualify that

Itanium was a gigabuck and drove everybody out of the high-end processor market except IBM leaving Xeon for Intel to monopolize for a decade+. I'd qualify that as a business success even if Itanium was a technical failure. And, it may be paying off after all. Graphics cards are effectively giant VLIW machines. And while Intel's new cards get slaughtered on DirectX 11 or older games, they are quite competitive when used on the DirectX 12+ stuff which basically wants a giant multi-core parallel processor.