> Iirc the silicon ia32 compat was gone by the time early systems were being built, Itanium first shipped in 2002 with silicon for the purpose-- it just was no

> Iirc the silicon ia32 compat was gone by the time early systems were being built, Itanium first shipped in 2002 with silicon for the purpose-- it just was not very good. The software compat layer showed up in late 2004 with Madison, and was far superior in every way to the ia32e silicon in earlier processors-- it had near-parity with Xeons for a couple of generations. But-- why pay tons more for near-parity with a cheaper processor? > But no shared libraries due to this. Using shared libraries from a different ISA is hard; x86-64 OSes didn't try to do this, nor did Apple's Rosetta in 2006 or Rosetta 2 in 202. Generally (not always) your user space program is made entirely of code for one architecture. It's hard to deal with different pointer widths, calling conventions, etc.