You have it backwards. Itanium 1, which had x86 and some limited hppa compatibility, had a ton of HP input. Itanium 2 dropped a lot of the broken ideas from I

You have it backwards. Itanium 1, which had x86 and some limited hppa compatibility, had a ton of HP input. Itanium 2 dropped a lot of the broken ideas from Itanium 1 in favor of .... slightly better than the worst performance in the industry. re: numerical workloads, they achieved high performance on SPECfp exactly the same way as late-generation HPPA chips -- just throw more L3 cache at it until the number looks good. Not exactly engineering genius.