https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium Itanium had Linux support from day one: > The Trillian Project was an effort by an

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium Itanium had Linux support from day one: > The Trillian Project was an effort by an industry consortium to port the Linux kernel to the Itanium processor. The project started in May 1999 with the goal of releasing the distribution in time for the initial release of Itanium, then scheduled for early 2000.[183] By the end of 1999, the project included Caldera Systems, CERN, Cygnus Solutions, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux and VA Linux Systems.[184] The project released the resulting code in February 2000.[183] The code then became part of the mainline Linux kernel more than a year before the release of the first Itanium processor. ... for values of "day one" which are prior to the release of the actual hardware. > The Trillian project was able to do this for two reasons: > the free and open source GCC compiler had already been enhanced to support the Itanium architecture. > a free and open source simulator had been developed to simulate an Itanium processor on an existing computer.[185] Itanium was The Future for a good while. It got plenty of resources, hardware, software, and marketing. By the late 1990s, people knew that full support in FOSS was required, so they made it happen. Itanium died because it was founded on a fundamental idea (making parallelism explicit and relying on software to extract it using static analysis) that simply didn't pan out, and when AMD brought the x86 ISA into the 64-bit world it was done.