>ia64 could've served the niche this article is catering toward No it can't. Itanium is a terrible design due to combining both static scheduling and pointless

>ia64 could've served the niche this article is catering toward No it can't. Itanium is a terrible design due to combining both static scheduling and pointless complexity. The worst of both worlds. If you really insisted on static scheduling, you would implement an EDGE [0] architecture. The idea is quite simple. Programs consist of instruction blocks with a finite size. The CPU performs some very basic scheduling on the block level so the expectation is that the compiler optimizes one block at a time. Additionally, these blocks can reference other blocks and form a graph to make up a complete program. The processor then schedules the instruction blocks dynamically. Tachyum built such a processor and it turns out they built it out of order anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_data_graph_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_data_graph_execution