1. Nostalgia for Itanium and the promise of AI‑driven compiler magic
"I miss itanium. I feel like a madman for saying it, but I do. Something about it is just alluring to me." – mghackerlady
"The compiler problems with VLIW could be solved to a degree with a purpose‑built AI." – spott
2. Itanium’s design was built for workloads that became obsolete
"It was also planned for a world where high‑end CPUs were differentiated by their ability to run floating‑point‑heavy workloads with relatively predictable memory access patterns. The rise of the web—and databases behind it—as the dominant high‑end, high‑margin workload obsoleted that assumption." – twoodfin
3. Market forces – AMD64/x86 supremacy and licensing limits – sealed Itanium’s fate
"Even if the magical Itanium compiler did exist, Itanium would have still lost to AMD64. As soon as you introduce anything that doesn't behave in a statically predictable manner (…) your performance drops down to a fraction of what a similarly priced AMD64 chip could do. VLIW is great for some very specific workloads like HPC, but Intel should have never tried to replace x86 with it." – ndiddy