The first iteration of Itanium, known as Merced, was truly awful, and this was Intel's fault. The second iteration, McKinley, was designed by HP and had more r

The first iteration of Itanium, known as Merced, was truly awful, and this was Intel's fault. The second iteration, McKinley, was designed by HP and had more reasonable performance, but not enough to stop AMD64. A big problem was that a quality compiler was hard to find, and without it everything just ran very slowly.