I think Itanium would have had a better chance if Intel had made their compilers and optimized libraries free, but your larger point is really important: Intel’

I think Itanium would have had a better chance if Intel had made their compilers and optimized libraries free, but your larger point is really important: Intel’s performance numbers for the Itanium seem to have been broadly extrapolated from a few very FPU-intensive benchmarks and I don’t think it was ever realistic to expect anything like that level of performance for branchy business logic or to decisively change the price-performance ratio to become compelling. I worked with some scientists who did have a ton of floating point-heavy code, so they were definitely interested but their code also had a lot of non-linear memory access and the Itanium never managed a performance lead at all, much less one big enough that it wouldn’t have been cheaper and faster to buy 2-4 other servers for each Itanium box. In contrast, when AMD released the Opteron it decisively took the lead in absolute performance as well as price/performance and so we bought them by the rack.