The IA-64 architecture had too much granularity of control dropped into software. Thus, reliable compiler designs were much more difficult to build. It wasn't

The IA-64 architecture had too much granularity of control dropped into software. Thus, reliable compiler designs were much more difficult to build. It wasn't a bad chip, but like Cell or modern Dojo tiles most people couldn't run it without understanding parallelism and core metastability. amd64 wasn't initially perfect either, but was accessible for mere mortals. =3