I don't think Itanium was CISC, they call it "EPIC" (explicitly parallel instruction computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_com

I don't think Itanium was CISC, they call it "EPIC" (explicitly parallel instruction computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction...). The basic idea of this was to move logic about what could be parallelized from the CPU to the compiler, but this turned out not to work so well. In Donald Knuth's words, "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."